The American Establishment And Other Reports Opinions And Speculations

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Rove re , Richar*. \ I * l v ?
The America o ^r\ <b1
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Brace & [1962]

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The American Establishment and Other Reports,
Opinions, and Speculations

Other Books by Richard BL Rovere

HOWE Sc HUMMEL: THEIR TRUE AND SCANDALOUS HISTORY

THE GENERAL AND THE PRESIDENT
(with Arthur M. Schfatfnger, /r)

AFFAIRS OF STATE: THE EISENHOWER YEARS
SENATOR JOE MCCARTHY

RICHARD H. ROVERE

The American Establishment
and Other Reports, Opinions, and
Speculations

I Hareourt, Brace & World, Inc.

NKW YORK

COPVWC.HT 1946, 1948, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955. 1950, 1957, 1958, 1961,

RICHARD H.

All rights rfitcrvnd* A/o part of this booh may be reproduced

in any form or by any mechanical mtans, including mimeograph

mid tap* rccorder f without permission in writing /ram l/w?

First edition

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63*9438

JPIUNTKO IN THK UN1TJ> STATES OF AMERICA

For Mark

PREFACE

THE FIRST SECTION of this book exhausts its author's knowledge of the

subject treated therein. Those who wish to know more about the Estab
lishment are advised to buy the New York Times and read between the
lines. They may also consult their friendly local F.B.I, agent and the

House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Peter J. McGuinncss, of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, died in 1948. He was
a peerless leader, and Brooklyn's Assistant Commissioner of Borough

Works, to the end.

The pieces on Truman and Dewey in 1948, Newbold Morris in 1953,
the "kept witnesses'* in 1955, and Eaxa Pound in 1957 appear exactly as
they were when first published. They are unchanged because they
seemed to me to have some documentary Interest that would be lessened
by revision.

As for the rest of the book; in general, I have regarded republication
as a second knock by opportunity. I have cut, I have amplified, 1 have
rewritten* 1 have even fused articles done at different times for different
publications. In such cases, the date used is that of the later, or latest*
publication.

The appreciation of George Orwell is taken from The Orwell
Reader, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company in 1956. "The Kept
Witnesses" was originally prepared as a report for the? Fund far the
Republic. All tine rest were commissioned by magazines, My thanks for
permission to use them here go to the proprietors of The. American
Scholar, Confluence, Esquire,, Harpers, The New Republic, The New
Yorker, The Progressive, The Reporter, and the Spectator of London.
Approximately half were written in the first instance for The Mm
Yorker, whose editor. William Shawn* has counseled me wisely and with
unfailing kindness lot eighteen years,

vii

Preface viii

Technical and literary consultants on this project were F. W. Du-
pee, Margaret Marshall, Frederick Q. Shafer, and Gore Vidal. Assistant
production managers were Ann Rovere and Julianna Ruhland. Special
effects by Eleanor Rovere and Elizabeth Rovere.

R.H.R.
New York
February 1962

>|c Contents

PREFACE VII

1 The American Establishment

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT _?

2 Matters Mainly of Fact

THE BIG HELLO 2$

EN ROUTE WITH TRUMAN AND DEWEY 6$

MR. MORRIS GOES TO WASHINGTON #5

THE KEPT WITNESSES JJJ
AT A BAIZE-COVERED TABLE ON THE ISLE OF RHODES

3 A Few Enthusiasms and Hostilities

HOLMES, J., SAGE 14$

WHITE MOUNTAINEER 155

THE IMPORTANCE OF GEORGE ORWELL l6j
ARTHUR HAYS VANDENBERG: NEW MAN IN THE PANTHEON 182

WILLKIE, ANOTHER HAPPY WARRIOR I$2
THE INTERIOR ICKES

THE CONTRARIETIES OF EZRA POUND 204

ix

Contents

SIDNEY HILLMAN, OR THE DOCTRINE OF GOOD CONNECTIONS
THE WICKED CONSPIRACY AGAINST GENERAL MAC ARTHUR

4 Judgments Reserved

PRIVACY AND THE CLAIMS OF COMMUNITY

THE INTERLOCKING OVERLAPPERS AND SOME FURTHER

THOUGHTS ON THE "POWER SITUATION"

LIFE AND DEATH AND SENTIENCE

THE CONSCIENCE OF ARTHUR MILLER

COMMUNISTS AND INTELLECTUALS 2.8$

THE DEAD RED DECADE

ON POLITICAL SOPHISTICATION

>j<PART ONE

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

The American Establishment*

To understand the United States today, it is
necessary to know something about the Establish
ment.

Most citizens don't realize it exists. Yet the
Establishment makes its influence felt from the
President's Cabinet to the professional life of a
young college teacher who wants a foundation
grant. It affects the nation's policies in almost
every area. The News 6* Courier, CHARLESTON, s. c.
October 18, 1961

IT is NOW, of course, conceded by most fair-minded and objective
authorities that there is an Establishment in America a more or
less closed and self-sustaining institution that holds a preponder
ance of power in our more or less open society. Naturally, Estab
lishment leaders pooh-pooh the whole idea; they deny the Exist
ence of the Establishment, disclaim any connection of their own
with it, and insist that they are merely citizens exercising citizens*
rights and responsibilities. They often maintain that the real
power is held by some other real or imagined force the voters,
the Congress, Madison Avenue, Comsymps, the rich, the poor, and
so forth. This is an ancient strategy; men of power have always
known how to use it. "Wouldst thou enjoy first rank?" St. John

* Some of this material originally appeared in The American Scholar
("Notes on the Establishment in America," Vol. 30, No. 4, Autumn 1961,
pp. 489-495). Many readers professed to be puzzled by my approach. Some
even asked if I intended my work to be taken seriously. I found their
questions disheartening and, I might as well add, more than a bit offensive.
They cast doubt not only on my own integrity but on that of the dis
tinguished journal which had the courage to publish my findings The
American Scholar is, after all, an official publication of the United Chapters
of Phi Beta Kappa. Its editors, of whom I am one, would certainly not be
parties to a hoax.

3

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT 4

Chrysostom- wrote. "Then cede it to another."* The News 6-
Courier is absolutely right.

Conceptions of the Establishment, to be sure, differ widely,
just as do conceptions of the Church, the State, and other im
portant institutions. Hilary Masters, a leading member of the
Dutchess County school of sociologists, defined it in a recent
lecturef as "the legitimate Mafia.";}; To William F. Buckley, Jr.,

* Homilies, c. 388.

j- Before the Edgewater Institute, Barrytown, N.Y., July 4, 1961. Vide
Proceedings, 1961, pp. 37-51. Also see Masters' first-rate monograph Estab
lishment Watering Places, Shekomeko Press, 1957.

J It was the figure of speech, not the actual analogy, that seemed so striking
and appropriate. Actually, the analogy was not actual and doubtless was
not intended to be regarded as such. The Establishment exists; the Mafia
does not exist. Modern scholarship has pretty well destroyed the myth of the
Mafia. Vide "The Myth of the Mafia," in The End of Ideology, by Daniel Bell,
The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1960. Bell cites a report by Serrell Hillman,
a highly reputable journalist who went all over the country to find out if
there really was a Mafia at work. He checked in at the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and asked the top men there if they believed in the Mafia.
They said they did not. Chicago Crime Commission same story. Hillman
could not check with the Central Intelligence Agency because it is forbidden
by statute to intervene in domestic affairs. But he did talk with innumerable
police officials, criminal lawyers, criminals, private detectives, and the like
none of whom could put him on the trail of the Mafia. He was eventually
forced to the conclusion that the only people who believed in it were (i)
Senator Estes Kefauver, of Tennessee; (2) Hearst crime reporters; and (3) the
Treasury Department's Bureau of Narcotics. Senator Kefauver once described
the Mafia in concrete terms. "The Mafia," he said, "is the cement that helps
to bind the Costello-Adonis-Lansky syndicate of New York and the Ac-
cardo-Guzik-Fischetti syndicate of Chicago." This sounds good but isn't. Note
that tricky word "helps." Besides, it is unproved that there is any cement.
If I may interject a purely personal note here, I may say that I have done a
bit of work on my own. One day in the summer of 1960, I was on an air
plane (United Airlines, Flight 420) and learned that the Hon. Frank S.
Hogan, District Attorney of New York County, was a fellow passenger. The
air was turbulent, and seat belts had to be fastened, so I could not approach
the famous prosecutor mysell I asked a stewardess if she would deliver a
note to Mr. Hogan, She said she would be delighted. My note read: "Dear
Mr. District Attorney: Is there a Mafia?" His reply was prompt and categori
cal. "No, Virginia, there is not/' he wrote. Still and all, I think that Masters'
phrase caught the spirit of the thing admirably. Dante's Inferno was a
product of the imagination, but it has helped many men to approach the
reality of beauty and even the beauty of reality. The Establishment really
is the cement that binds the Rockefeller-Gill-Sulzberger syndicate in New
York to the Stevenson-Field-Sandburg syndicate in Chicago. In the interests
of precision, Masters might have made a slight qualification of the adjective
"legitimate." There are a few places where the Establishment cannot func
tion legally. But of that, more later.

5 The American Establishment

and his collaborators on the National Review, it is almost inter
changeable with the "Liberal Machine," which turns out the
"Liberal Line." Their Establishment includes just about everyone
in the country except themselves* and the great hidden, enlight
ened majority of voters who would, if only they were given the
chance, put a non-Establishment man in the White House and
have John Kenneth Galbraith recalled from India or left there
and relieved of his passport. Galbraith, himself a pioneer in the
field of Establishment studies, sees the Establishment as a rather
small group of highly placed and influential men who embody the
best of the Conventional Wisdom and can be trusted with sub
stantial grants of power by any responsible group in the coun
try. The perfect Establishment type, in his view, would be the
Republican called to service in a Democratic administration
(e.g., the present Secretary of the Treasury, Douglas Dillon) or
the vice versa. "They are the pivotal people/' he observed in one
of his earlier studies. (Italics his.) That was before his appoint
ment as the Establishment's man in New Delhi. (He is not a
member of his own Establishment, however, for he could not
hope to be held over in a Republican administration.)

The fact that experts disagree on exactly what the Establish
ment is and how it works does not mean that they are talking
about different things or about something that does not exist.
Experts disagree about the Kingdom of God. This is not an
argument against its existence; plainly the Kingdom of God is
many things. Differences of opinion over the meaning of "justice"
have given rise to one of the most honored professions in the
world. One dogmatic Marxist may quarrel with another over
the proper "role of the proletariat" and even about who should
and who should not be counted as belonging to the "bourgeoisie."
This does not make a fiction or a meaningless abstraction of

* It is characteristic of most thinkers and writers on the subject to define
the Establishment in such a way as to keep themselves outside it and even
victimized by it. Werner von Fromm has suggested that they all tend toward
a mild paranoia, and what little clinical evidence there is tends to support
him. The one exception known to me is Francois Grund, a French economist
of conservative leanings, who has applied to the Establishment Burke's
phrases for the nobility "an ornament of the civil order . . . the Corinthian
capital of ... society." Both Von Fromm's and Grund's observations are to
be found in the 1961 Edgewater Proceedings.

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT 6

either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. The Establishment can
be thought of in many different ways, all of them empirically
valid in one or another frame of reference. Masters, Buckley,
Galbraith, and Corradini* look upon the Establishment from
quite different points of view which grow in the main out of
their differing disciplines but they would have no difficulty in
agreeing that Douglas Dillon is true blue or that, say, Senator
Thomas J. Dodd, of Connecticut, is on the outside looking in
disapprovingly, in his case. Despite their differences of empha
sis and approach, none of them would have many reservations
about the News & Courier's definition:

The Establishment is a general term for those people in finance, busi
ness, and the professions, largely from the Northeast, who hold the
principal measure of power and influence in this country irrespective
of what administration occupies the White House. ... [It is] a working
alliance of the near-socialist professor and the internationalist Eastern
banker calling for a bland bi-partisan approach to national politics.'!"

For my own part, I think the definition is a pretty good one.
I would cavil a bit at the notion that "the Establishment is a
general term" etc. It is a good deal more than a collective noun,
as I shall make clear. Moreover, there is a slight ambiguity in
the phrase "principal measure of power." Too many journalists,
awed by their observations of the Establishment at work, leap to
the conclusion that its power is not only great but invariably
decisive. This is by no means the case. There are powerful anti-
Establishment forces at work, and frequently they prevail. It
seems to me perfectly clear, for example, that the Establishment
has never found a way of controlling Congress.^ Indeed, there

* H. E. Corradini, author of Patterns of Authority in American Society
(Gainesville Press, 1958). Corradini, an anthropologist, draws a striking
parallel between the American Establishment and the Ydenneks, an inter
tribal council that still functions in Canada.

fThe newspaper's anti-Establishment bias is plain enough, as is the edi
torialist's sense of exclusion. "Southerners have no place in the Establish
ment," he writes, "except for a domesticated handful who have turned their
backs on regional beliefs." For "regional beliefs" read Senator J. Strom
Thurmond and Governor Orval Faubus.

JFrom time to time, it has managed to hold a balance of power in the
Senate, but it has never done even this much in the House. The Congressional
Monthly for January 1962, surveying the entire performance of the first

7 The American Establishment

are times when Congress appears to be nothing more or less than
a conspiracy to louse up the plans of the Establishment. Whatever
the Establishment wants, it often seems, Congress mulishly op
poses.

Nor has the Establishment ever made much headway in such
fields as advertising, television, or motion pictures. The basic
orientation o the leaders in all these fields is anti-Establishment,
and what Establishment strength exists is concentrated mainly
on the lower levels in advertising, the copy writers; in television,
certain of the news departments (most notably at Columbia
Broadcasting); and in the motion pictures, a few writers and ac
tors. Still, Establishment strength in these areas is generally unim
pressive. In Hollywood, to take a simple example, ICMPAFPWJ,
the Independent Committee of the Motion Picture Arts for
Freedom and Peace With Justice, an Establishment front, held a
fund-raising meeting in the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel on Novem
ber 20, 1961. Only twenty-eight persons attended, and the take
for the evening, after eloquent pleas for support from Paul
Newman and Joanne Woodward, was $3,067.50. (Of this amount,
$2,900 was in the form of pledges, only about fifteen per cent of
which, in all likelihood, were actually redeemable. On the very
same evening, at the Beverly Hilton, the National Foundation
for Amoebic Dysentery raised more than five times as much, all
in cash or checks of that date, from three times as many people.)

The Establishment does not control everything, but its influ
ence is pervasive, and it succeeds far more often than its antag
onists in fixing the major goals of American society. Though it
does not, as I have noted, come anywhere close to controlling
Congress, Congress is everlastingly reacting to it. Within the
next couple of years, for example, Congress will spend a good
part of its time fighting the Establishment program for a great
revision of American trade practices and for eventual American
association with the European Common Market. This whole

session of the Eighty-seventh Congress, found that only nineteen members
of the House had Establishment voting records of better than eighty per
cent. Of the nineteen, who accounted for less than five per cent of the total
membership, twelve were Democrats, seven were Republicans. Fourteen were
from the Eastern seaboard, two from California, and one each from Oregon,
Louisiana, and Minnesota.

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT 8

scheme was cooked up at a three-day meeting of the Executive
Committee at the Sheraton-Park in Washington immediately
after President Kennedy's inauguration on January 20, 1961.*
The odds are heavily against the Establishment winning this
battle in 1962 or even in 1963. The important thing, though, is
that the Establishment has taken the initiative and put its
great antagonist on the defensive. Practically everyone is agreed
that in time the victory, even in this difficult matter, will go to
the Establishment.

The Establishment is not, of course, at any level a membership
organization in the sense that it collects dues, issues cards, or holds
meetings openly under its own auspices. It is a coalition of forces,
the leaders of which form the top directorate, or Executive Com
mittee referred to sometimes as "Central." At the lower levels,
organization is quite loose, almost primitive in some cases, and
this is one of the facts that explains the differences in definition
among ex{feft$. In the upper reaches, though, certain divisions
have achieved a Irigji degree of organization. For instance, the
directors of the Council on Foreign Relations make up a sort of
Presidium for that part of the Establishment that guides our
destiny as a nation.f (The unimpeachable source, a dissident
Executive Committee member who leaked the story about the
Common Market decision, said that the Gist Subcommittee ap
pointed to work on the Common Market matter had only two
members not drawn from the Council.) The presidents and

* The meeting had been called not for this purpose alone, but to review
the state of the world generally at the start of the new President's term.
The question of American intervention in Cuba, for example, was discussed
at length and, eventually, tabled because the Committee members were so
divided among themselves. A resolution was passed urging President Kennedy
to meet with Nikita Khrushchev "at an early date with a view to determining
whether any basis for negotiations to reduce tensions presently exists." The
Common Market matter came up when Roscoe Gist reported that George
Ball, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and himself a Committee
member, wished to pressure the United Kingdom into joining the Common
Market and looked to a day when we, too, might belong. By a vote of 23-5,
with two abstentions, he was authorized to go ahead.

fThe President, of course, has Constitutional responsibility for foreign
affairs, and I am not suggesting that any recent President has abdicated to
the CFR. But policy and strategy are worked out in the Council and reach
the President by way of the State Department, which, of course, is largely
staffed and always directed by Council members.

p The American Establishment

senior professors of the great Eastern universities frequently
constitute themselves as ad hoc Establishment committees. Now
and then, the Executive Committee regroups as an Establish
ment front for some particular end. In the summer of 1961, as a
case in point, when anti-Establishment forces in Congress and
elsewhere threatened the President's foreign-aid program, the
Establishment, at the request of the White House, hastily formed
fhe Citizens' Committee for International Development and
managed to bull through a good deal of what the President
wanted. The Establishment has always favored foreign aid. It
is, in fact, a matter on which Establishment discipline may be
invoked.

Summing up the situation at the present moment, it can, I
think, be said that the Establishment maintains effective control
over the Executive and Judicial branches of government; that it
dominates most of American education and intellectual life; that
it has very nearly unchallenged power in deciding what is and
what is not respectable opinion in this country. Its authority is
enormous in organized religion (Roman Catholics* and funda
mentalist Protestants to one side), in science, and, indeed, in all
the learned professions except medicine. It is absolutely unrivaled
in the great new world created by the philanthropic foundations
a fact which goes most of the way toward explaining why so
little is known about the Establishment and its workings. Not
one thin dime of Rockefeller, Carnegie, or Ford money has been
spent to further Establishment studies.f

* It should be noted, though, that it is becoming influential in Catholic
journalism. A content survey of twelve leading Catholic periodicals showed
thirty-eight per cent of the text to be Establishment-inspired.

f The situation approaches scandal at times. The foundations and universi
ties have subsidized a number of first-rate Establishment scholars. Daniel Bell,
H. E. Corradini, Alfred Kazin, and Mary McCarthy have received Guggenheim
Fellowships and other such benefactions, but always for something other
than Establishment studies. A few universities Florida, Southern Methodist,
Rampna, Virginia Military Institute, and Michigan State have done what
little they could to help out, and so have a few of the less well-heeled
foundations. But there is a general lockout in the richer and better-known
institutions. Some have even gone so far as to encourage what might be
called "red-herring scholarship" efforts to prove that something other than
the Establishment dominates the country. A notorious example is C. Wright
Mills' The Power Elite (Oxford University Press, 1956). It was subsidized by
the Huntington Hartford Foundation, Columbia University's Social Science

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT 10

If it were not for the occasional formation of public committees
such as the Citizens' Committee for International Development,
Establishment scholars would have a difficult time learning who
the key figures are. Committee rosters serve Establishmentologists
in the same way that May Day photographs of the reviewing
stand above Lenin's tomb serve the Kremlinologists. By close
analysis of them, by checking one list of names against another,
it is possible to keep tabs quite accurately on the Executive
Committee. A working principle agreed upon by Establishment
scholars is this: If in the course of a year a man's name turns up
fourteen times in paid advertisements in, or collective letters to,
the New York Times, the official Establishment daily, it is about
fourteen to one that he is a member of the Executive Committee.
(I refer, naturally, to advertisements and letters pleading Estab
lishment causes.) There are, to be sure, exceptions. Sometimes a
popular athlete or movie actor will, innocently or otherwise,
allow himself and his name to be exploited by the Establishment.
He might turn up twenty times a year and still have no real
status in the institution. But that is an exception. The rule is as
stated above.

One important difference between the American Establishment
and the party hierarchy in Russia is that the Establishment chair
man is definitely not the man in the center of the picture or the
one whose name is out of alphabetical order in the listings. The
secret is astonishingly well kept. Some people, to be sure, have
argued that when, as happens most of the time, the Establish
ment has a man of its own in the White House, he automatically
becomes chairman just as he automatically becomes commander
in chief of the armed forces. I am quite certain that this is not
the case. For one thing, the Establishment rarely puts one of its
tried and trusted leaders in the White House. Dwight Eisenhower
and John F. Kennedy have both served the Establishment and
been served by it, but neither is or ever was a member of the
innermost circle. Both, indeed, were admitted with some reluc-

Research Council, and Brandeis University. Even the parent body, the
British Establishment, got into the act through the Oxford University Press,
which, Mills admits, went "far beyond the office of publisher in helping me
get on with this/'

ii The American Establishment

tance on the part of senior members, and Eisenhower's standing
has at times been most insecure.

I am not sure who the chairman of the Establishment is today,
although I would not be altogether surprised to learn that he is
Dean Rusk. By a thrust of sheer intuition, though, I did get the
name of the 1958 chairman and was rather proud of myself for
doing so. In that year, I discovered that J. K. Galbraith had for
some time been surreptitiously at work in Establishment studies,
and he told me that he had found out who was running the
thing. He tested me by challenging me to guess the man's name.
I thought hard for a while and was on the point of naming
Arthur Hays Sulzberger, of the New York Times, when suddenly
the right name sprang to my lips. "John J. McCloy," I ex
claimed. "Chairman of the Board of the Chase Manhattan Bank;
once a partner in Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, and also in
Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine 8c Wood, as well as, of course,
Milbank, Tweed, Hope, Hadley fc McCloy; former United
States High Commissioner in Germany; former President of the
World Bank; liberal Republican; chairman of the Ford Founda
tion and chairman my God, how could I have hesitated of the
Council on Foreign Relations; Episcopalian." "That's the one,"
Galbraith said. He congratulated me for having guessed what it
had taken him so much patient research to discover.

The Establishment is not monolithic in structure or inflexible
in doctrine. There is an Establishment "line," but adherence is
compulsory only on certain central issues, such as foreign aid. On
economic affairs, for example, several views are tolerated. The
accepted range is from about as far left as, say, Walter Reuther
to about as far right as^ say, Dwight Eisenhower. A man cannot be
for less welfarism than Eisenhower, and to be farther left than
Reuther is considered bad taste.* Racial equality is another

* Setting the limitations on the left is not much of a problem nowadays,
for the left has been inching toward the center at the rate of about seven
inches per year; the only extreme positions in this epoch are on the right,
and these are inadmissible. It is interesting to consider the change that
has come over the Establishment in the last twenty years. In their views on
government intervention and related questions, Wendell Willkie in the
early forties and Dwight Eisenhower in the early sixties seemed peas from

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT 12

matter on which the Establishment forbids dissent. Opposition
to integration is a cause for expulsion, or at least suspension for
not less than a year, unless it is mere "token" opposition. The
only white Southern members of the Establishment in anything
like good standing are reconstructed Southerners or Southerners
the Establishment has reason to believe would be reconstructed
if political circumstances would allow it. Take Senator J. William
Fulbright, of Arkansas. He is a pillar of the Establishment even
though he votes with the unenlightened on racial matters. The
Council on Foreign Relations gave him an "A-i" rating when he
was up for chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.*
The Executive Committee accepts him because it assumes his
heart is in the right place. He is, after all, a former Rhodes
scholar and a university president. Moreover, the Fulbright
scholarships have provided an enormous subsidy for Establish
ment intellectuals.

The Establishment has lately been having a most difficult time
with those of its members clergy, scientists, and academicians,
in the main who have joined the Committee for a Sane
Nuclear Policy. The Executive Committee in particular that
powerful "hard-line" faction led by Dean Acheson and Roscoe
Gist has no use at all for this organization and would deal
very sharply with its supporters if they did not include so many
people who incorporate most of the Establishment virtues.
Exactly what stand it will take remains to be seen.

In nonpolitical affairs, great doctrinal latitude is not only
tolerated but encouraged. In religion, the Establishment is
rigorously disestablishmentarian. Separatism is another matter
on which discipline may be invoked.f Like a city-wide ticket, in

the same pod. But Willkie in his time was regarded as an economic liberal,
whereas Eisenhower in ours is clearly a conservative. It has been estimated
that by 1968, views such as Eisenhower's will be considered excessively
rightist as Barry Goldwater's are today and will not be tolerated.

* It exercised the veto power, though, when he was proposed as Secretary
of State. It wanted Dean Rusk to get the job, and used Fulbright's record
on racial questions as an argument against Fulbright's candidacy.

f"The Establishment," the Reverend F. Q. Shafer said, in the first of his
1961 Geist Lectures at Brownlee Seminary, *' takes the view that religion is a
matter of conscience and has no place in politics or in education. It evidently
sees no contradiction between this and its endlessly repeated dictum that
politics and education must always be informed by conscience."

i 3 The American Establishment

New York, the Executive Committee is carefully balanced
religiously as well as racially. (The only important difference is
that several places are kept for nonbelievers.) The only pro
scribed views are the noisier ones. Though he now and then gets
an audience in the White House, Billy Graham is persona non
grata in Establishment circles. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen is
regarded as a Catholic Billy Graham and is similarly a pariah.
Reinhold Niebuhr is the official Establishment theologian, and
Bishop Angus Dun is the chaplain.

In matters of public policy, it may be said that those principles
and policies that have the editorial support of the New York
Times are at the core of Establishment doctrine. And those ir
regularities and eccentricities that receive sympathetic consider
ation in the Times (not only on the editorial page but in the
Sunday Magazine and the Book Review) are within the range of
Establishment doctrinal tolerance.

It is essential to an understanding of the Establishment to
recognize its essentially national characteristics. The whole of
its power is greater than the sum of its parts. Its leading figures
have national and international reputations but very often are
persons of only slight influence or standing in the cities and
states from which they come. Former Chairman McCloy, for
example, cuts a lot of ice in Washington, Geneva, Paris, London,
Rio de Janeiro, Bonn, Moscow, and Tokyo, but practically none
in Manhattan. In Albany, he is almost unknown. The relative
weakness of the Establishment in the states undoubtedly helps
to explain the shellackings it repeatedly gets in Congress. State
wide or one might say, statewise it is often torn by a kind of
factionalism that seldom afflicts its national and international
operations. In New York, for example, Averell Harriman and
Nelson Rockefeller have often found themselves locked in
combat like Grant and Lee; in Washington, they are Alphonse
and Gaston. And so it goes.

A state-by-state canvass of Establishment strengths and weak
nesses was conducted by Perry Associates, a St. Louis firm, in
1959. Some of the highlights follow:

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT 14

In three states Texas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota the
Establishment is virtually outlawed. There are no restrictive or
repressive measures on the statute books, but there is persistent
harassment by police and other officials. The American Civil
Liberties Union had expressed some interest in arranging a test
case, but no suitable one was found. Despite constant police
surveillance, there is considerable underground Establishment
activity in the Dallas area and in San Antonio.

The Indiana authorities are openly hostile to the Establish
ment, and there has been continuing agitation for a law
requiring Establishment agents to register with the Attorney
General and be fingerprinted. It is hard to see what would be
accomplished by this, for the Perry people could find no trace
of Establishment activity anywhere in Indiana, except at Indiana
University, in Bloomington. The faculty people there are state
employees anyway and can quite easily be dealt with. In neither
Nebraska nor Idaho could any Establishment influence be
found. There were only the faintest traces in Wyoming, New
Hampshire, Utah, and Florida.

Florida was the one Southern state in which Establishment
forces seemed exceedingly weak. Elsewhere, it was learned,
nearly all those who described themselves as "moderates" were
actually connected with the Establishment.

The big centers are, as one might expect, the states with large
cities and large electoral votes: New York, California, Illinois,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Massachusetts. A rather surprising
case, though, was Kansas, which ranked ahead of New Jersey and
Maryland.

For some reason, Establishment studies have attracted few
historians. Most of the work thus far has been undertaken by
journalists, economists, sociologists, and psychologists. In con
sequence, very little has been done to uncover the origins of the
Establishment. One British historian, Keith E. D. Smith-Kyle,
maintains, in America in the Round (Polter & Polter, Ltd.,
London, 1956), that "the American pretense to equality was, to
speak bluntly, given the lie by the formation in the early days
of the Republic of the sort of 'command* group similar in most

15 The American Establishment

respects to what Britons nowadays speak of as 'the Establish
ment/ By 1847, when the Century Association was founded in
New York, power had been consolidated in a handful of hands.
From then on, whenever there was a laying on of hands/ the
blood in those extremities was the very blood that had coursed
through those that had molded the clay of life in the so-called
Federal period."

It is plain that Smith-Kyle is trying to say, in a roundabout
British way, that a hereditary aristocracy runs the show here. He
is as wrongheaded in this matter as he is in most others. 5 * Ameri
can students, though they number few trained historiansf among
them and none of a celebrity that compares with Smith-Kyle's,
subscribe almost unanimously to the proposition that the Estab
lishment came into being at a far later date to be exact, as well
as neat, at the turn of the century. They see the institution form
ing during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, who by
common consent was the first Establishment President and in a
way the last.J The Founding Fathers of today's group zeroed
in on T. R. as if they had caught him in a perfect bombsight.
Consider them all, a few of them still alive, all of them within
living memory: Henry L. Stimson, William Allen White,
Nicholas Murray Butler, Robert Frost, Albert Beveridge, Abra
ham Hummel, Joseph Choate, William Travers Jerome, Jacob
Riis, Charles Evans Hughes, Felix Frankfurter, Ida M. Tarbell,
Joseph Pulitzer, Martin Provensen, Lincoln Steffens, Benson
Frost, Learned Hand, W. Adolphe Roberts, Jane Addams,
Nelson W. Aldrich, Eleanor Alice Burgess, John Hay, John Ray,

* Vide his revolting apology for Munich, The Noble Experiment (Heineken,
London, 1939), and his blatantly Stalinist The Bear and the Jug (Bafer &
Bafer, 1949).

f Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has done fairly decent work in the past (vide
The General and the President, with Richard H. Rovere) but his judgments
are suspect because of his own connections with the Establishment.

J This is a rather fine point. Since Roosevelt's time, every President ex
cept Harding and Truman has taken office with full Establishment approval.
So far as can be determined, though, no one has ever gone directly from the
Executive Committee to the office of Chief Executive. Woodrow Wilson is
sometimes cited as an exception, but it is dubious in the extreme that he
was one. Charles Evans Hughes, his 1916 opponent, was an Executive Com
mittee man.

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT 16

John Jay Chapman, Van Wyck Brooks, Carl Schurz, Hamlin
Garland, Oscar Straus, Winthrop Chanler, James R. Bourne,
Whitelaw Reid, and Gifford Pinchot.*

There, plainly, was the first Executive Committee!

Some uninformed publicists confuse the Establishment with
the Organization. The two could not be more different. The
Establishment Man and the Organization Man could not be
more different, or more at odds. The Establishment uses the
Organization from time to time, as a ruling group must in an
industrial and commercial society. But it devoutly hopes that in
time the Organization will wither away. The Organization
would like to overthrow the Establishment. It had a near
success when it ran its 1960 chairman, Richard M. Nixon, for
President of the United States.

The New York Times has no close rival as an Establishment
daily. Technological advance is making it possible for the Times
to become a national newspaper. This development should add
immeasurably to the growth of the institution's powers.

Most Establishment personnel get at least one newspaper
besides the Times, in order to keep up with Walter Lippmann
and Joseph Alsop. Papers that carry both these columnists are
in good standing with the Establishment and get a lot of advertis
ing that way.

There are some specialized magazines but none of general
circulation that can be described as official or semiofficial organs.
I have pondered long over the case of Time and have concluded
that it has no real place in the Establishment. It goes too far in
attacking Establishment positions and it has treated many Estab
lishment members with extreme discourtesy and at times with
vulgarity. The Establishment fears Time, of course, and it now
and then shows cravenness in its attempts to appease it by
putting Henry Luce on some commission or other (on freedom of
the press, national goals, and so forth), or by giving his wife some

*I am indebted for this list to F. W. Dupee's illuminating study "The
Suddeys of Wildercliff and the Origins of the Establishment," No. IV in the
Occasional Papers published by the Mid-Hudson Historical Society. Mr.
Dupee is professor of English at Columbia University and perhaps the
country's leading authority on Henry James.

jy The American Establishment

political job. But the Luce publications generally must be con
sidered as outside the Establishment.

Now that control of Newsweek has passed to Philip L. Graham,
publisher of the Washington Post, it may be that the Establish
ment will adopt it as an official weekly.

US. News & World Report is widely read but held in low
regard.

Foreign Affairs has, within its field, the authority of Pravda
and Izvestia.

Harper's, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker all have Establish
ment clienteles but none can be regarded as official. The Saturday
Review was once heavily patronized but no longer is. The New
Republic is coming up. The Nation has long since gone down.
A few of the younger Establishment intellectuals read Partisan
Review, but the more sophisticated ones regard it as stuffy and
prefer The Noble Savage, edited by Saul Bellow and issued at
irregular intervals by the World Publishing Company.

As Thomas R. Waring, the noted Southern journalist, has
pointed out, "The significance of the Establishment can be dis
covered by finding out who is not a member." No one has yet
compiled a complete list of nonmembers, but the following
names may help significance-seekers to get their bearings. These
people are known to be nonmembers:

The Honorable Lyndon B. Johnson, Vice-President of the

United States.

Frank McGehee, director, Nation-Indignation Convention.
The Honorable Richard M. Nixon, former Vice-President of

the United States.

E. B. Germany, Board Chairman, Lone Star Steel.
The Honorable John Nance Garner, former Vice-President of

the United States.
Cus d'Amato, prominent New York sportsman and manager of

Floyd Patterson, heavyweight champion of the world.
J. Edgar Hoover, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.
Allen Ginsberg, poet.

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT 18

The Honorable James A. Farley, former Chairman, Demo
cratic National Committee.

Gus Hall, general secretary, National Committee, Communist
Party, U.S.A.

Fowler Harbison, President, Ramona College.

James Hoffa, President, International Brotherhood of Team
sters.

Hetherington Wells, Chairman of the Board, Consolidated
Hydraulics, Inc.

Spruille Braden, diplomatist. (Here is a curious case indeed.
Ambassador Braden has held many leading positions in the
Establishment and is even now a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations. But he is also a member of the Council of
the John Birch Society. He was read out of the Establish
ment on April 14, 1960, before his John Birch connections
were known.)

Sherman Adams, formerly the assistant to the President of the
United States.

Edgar Queeny, President, Monsanto Chemical Corporation.

Charles Goren, bridge expert.

Charles A. Lindbergh, aviator.

Stan ton Evans, editor, Indianapolis News,

The Honorable John McCormack, Speaker, House of Repre
sentatives.

Archbishop Theodotus, Holy Orthodox: Church in America.

The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, pastor, Fifth Avenue
Presbyterian Church and author of The Power of Positive
Thinking.

Cyrus M. Eaton, industrialist and philanthropist.

The Honorable Everett McKinley Dirksen, United States
Senator from Illinois and Senate minority leader.

Dr. Edward Teller, nuclear physicist, often known as "Father
of the Hydrogen Bomb/'

Conrad Hilton, hotel executive.

The Honorable Thomas Hughes, Governor of New Jersey.

Michael J. Quill, President, Transport Workers Union.

Morris Fishbein, MJD. S editor and official, American Medical
Association.

jp The American Establishment

George Sokolsky, syndicated columnist.
Duke Snider, outfielder, Los Angeles Dodgers.
John L. Lewis, President, United Mine Workers of America.
Carleton Putnam, writer, former Chairman of the Board,
Delta Air Lines.

The Establishment has in its top councils some people who
appear to the unsophisticated to be oppositionists. For example,
Norman Thomas, the Socialist leader; Norman Mailer, the self-
styled "hipster" novelist; and Norman Podhoretz, the firebrand
editor of Commentary, all enjoy close relations with leading
figures on the Executive Committee. The Reverend Martin
Luther King has been proposed for membership on the Executive
Committee. In 1957, a planning committee met for two days at
the Royalton Hotel in New York and reported that "we need in
formed, constructive criticism fully as much as we need support"
and urged the recruitment of "people who will take a long, cold
look at our policies and procedures and candidly advise us of any
weaknesses they see. We recommend that in the cases of people
playing this indispensable role of 'devil's advocate/ all discipline
be suspended/'

It is interesting to observe the workings of the Establishment
in Presidential politics. As I have pointed out, it rarely fails to
get one of its members, or at least one of its allies, into the White
House. In fact, it generally is able to see to it that both nominees
are men acceptable to it. It is never quite powerful enough,
though, to control a nominating convention or actually to dictate
nominations. National conventions represent regional interests
much as Congress does, and there is always a good deal of
unarticulated but nonetheless powerful anti-Establishment senti
ment at the quadrennial gatherings of both Republicans and
Democrats. Nevertheless, the great unwashed who man the
delegations understand almost intuitively, it seems that they
cannot win without the Establishment, and the more responsible
among them have the foresight to realize that even if they did
win they could not run the country without assistance from the
Executive Committee. Over the years, a deal has been worked out

THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT 20

that is almost an operating rule of American politics. I am
indebted to the novelist Margaret Creal for this concise formula
tion of it:

"When an Establishment man is nominated for the Presidency
by either party., the Vice-Presidential candidate must be drawn
from outside the Establishment. When, as has occasionally hap
pened, the Establishment is denied the Presidential nomination,
it must be given the Vice-Presidential nomination."

The system has worked almost perfectly for the last thirty
years. In that time, the only non-Establishment man in the White
House has been Harry Truman, and he had been Franklin
Roosevelt's non-Establishment Vice-President. Putting Henry
Wallace aside as a pretty far-out case and not counting Alben
Barkley (a Vice-President's Vice-President), the Vice-Presidents
have all been non-Establishment: John Nance Garner, Harry
Truman, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson.

Now observe what happens when the Establishment has to
yield first place, as it had to do at the Republican convention in
1960. Richard Nixon, a non-Establishment Vice-President, simply
could not be denied the Presidential nomination. So the Estab
lishment Republicans demanded and of course obtained Henry
Cabot Lodge. There was a similar case in 1936, when the
Republicans went outside the Establishment to nominate Alf
Landon for first place. The Vice-Presidential candidate was
Colonel Frank Knox, the publisher of the Chicago Daily News,
a Lippmann-Alsop paper, and later Roosevelt's Secretary of War.
Four years later, the Establishment nominated Wendell Willkie
on the Republican ticket and agreed to Charles McNary, dis
tinctly non-Establishment. In 1944, it was Dewey (Establishment)
and Bricker (Non). The Establishment was particularly powerful
in 1948 and not only got Dewey again but Earl Warren. In 1952,
the usual deal was made in both parties: Eisenhower versus
Stevenson (Establishment) and Nixon and Sparkman (Non).
Same thing in 1956, with Estes Kefauver in for Sparkman.

The Russians have caught on to the existence of the Estab
lishment and understand some of its workings quite well. Nikita

^x The American Establishment

Khrushchev showed himself to be no slouch when he told Walter
Lippmann, last spring, that President Kennedy was controlled by
Nelson Rockefeller. Many people regarded this as depressing evi
dence of the grip of old-school Marxism on Khrushchev's mind.
They thought he was mistaking a faded symbol of industrial and
mercantile power for the real wielder of authority under People's
Capitalism. He was doing nothing of the sort. He was facing the
facts of Establishment life. Not as a Standard Oil heir but as an
Establishment agent, Nelson Rockefeller had forced the Republi
cans to rewrite their platform so that it conformed very closely to
Chester Bowies' Democratic platform and provided for a vigorous
anti-Communist defense program. Where did the central ideas of
both platforms originate? In where else? the studies made by
the Rockefeller Panel for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and
published as Prospects for America. Who was on the Rockefeller
Panel? Here are just a few of the names, left and right:

Dean Rusk Lucius D. Clay

Chester Bowles Arthur F. Burns

Jacob Potofsky Henry R. Luce*

Henry Kissinger Oveta Gulp Hobby

Anna Rosenberg David Sarnoff

And when Kennedy became President, from what foundation did
he get his Secretary of State? The Rockefeller Foundation, of
course.

* The outsider inside. I once asked an authority on the parent body, the
British Establishment, how he accounted for the sudden eminence of Barbara
Ward. He explained that every Establishment agency (the B.B.C. directors,
for example) had to have at least one woman and one Roman Catholic. Miss
Ward was a neat package deal.

>|< PART TWO

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT

* The Big Hello

1946

PETER j. MC GUINNESS, a big, tough, happy, red-faced Irishman
who for the past twenty-two years has been the Democratic
leader of the working-class section of Brooklyn called Green-
point, is the first citizen of that grimy community and the last of
New York's old-time district bosses. "I'm the boss of Greenpoint,"
he often says. "What I say there goes." McGuinness, who is fifty-
eight, was Greenpoint's alderman from 1920 to 1931 and has been
its Democratic state committeeman since 1924. He has been before
its voters more than thirty times in primary and general elections.
Each time he has done better than the time before. For the past
few years, no one has bothered to run against him.

McGuinness is so well known in Greenpoint that he has no
need to use his surname on campaign literature. "Peter for
Sheriff"; "Peter for State Committeeman," his Greenpoint posters
say. A flyer used in a recent campaign read:

VOTE FOB PETER

It's no wonder that everyone likes Mm.

Peter is the only Politician

in the Forty-eight States

who devotes All his time to the People.

Sometimes he is spoken of as "The McGuinness." To many Green-
pointers, his name is synonymous with statesmanship in general.
A stock feature story for the Weekly Star, a community news
paper, tells of the schoolboy or first voter asked to name the

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 26

mayor, the governor, or the President and answering "Peter J.
McGuinness" or "The McGuinness." McGuinness is not only
Greenpoint's political leader but its social leader and its arbiter
of taste. The main social event of the year is Annual McGuin
ness Night, a black-tie affair that is held in the Labor Lyceum
the first Saturday after Lent and causes a considerable upswing
in the tuxedo-rental business. Another occasion of note is the
Monster McGuinness Theatre Party, held in the late fall at
Loew's Meserole, and still others are Ye Olde McGuinnesse
Farme Barne Dance Nighte, a harvest celebration, and the Mc
Guinness Cotton Blossom Showboat Night, a midsummer cruise
on a chartered river boat. Possibly the greatest tribute to Mc-
Guinness's standing in Greenpoint is the flowering of the lyric
spirit he has inspired. It may well be that more poetry has been
written about him than about anyone in American politics
since Abraham Lincoln. An example, from the Weekly Star, is an
epic ballad of twenty-three verses by Maurice Dee, which begins

There's a man in our town whom you all know well,
A few things about him I'm now going to tell
He's tall, broad, and handsome, with a smile that has won us
You can easily guess he is Peter McGuinness

and goes on to recite some stirring events in McGuinness's history,
such as

When we heard that the coolies were after our job
And our daily bread they were trying to rob
Then we needed a leader we were sure would be with us,
Then our old pal came forward, Peter McGuinness

ending on a note of near-despair over the difficulties of dealing
with so grand a theme in so poor a form:

Oh, I could go on writing till this pencil wore down
About the ways he is loved in this town.
But the thing we prize most is the fact he is with us
Our tall, broad, and handsome Peter McGinness.

At a time when people in general tend to be cynical about
politicians and their motives, such standing as McGuinness

27 The Big Hello

enjoys in Greenpolnt is not easily won or maintained. He has
achieved it because he works hard and delights in his work. He
tends his vineyard by day and by night. He is probably the only
politician in the city who still follows the old custom o holding
court on a street corner and greeting passers-by by name. Every
Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, in seasonable weather,
he props his enormous body against a lamppost at the corner of
Manhattan and Norman Avenues, Greenpoint's main intersec
tion, and invites strollers to stop and chat with him. "That's
when I give me people the big hello," he says. He enjoys giving
people the big hello, just as he enjoys everything else about
politics. He likes making speeches; marching in parades; attend
ing weddings, christenings, confirmations, and funerals; and
running Kiddies* Day outings. He says that the most memorable
moment of his life came in the closing moments of the 1936
Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, when James
A. Farley asked him to read, over a national radio hookup, the
resolution thanking the networks for their coverage. "Bejesus,"
he says, "I stood up there on the platform with the Vice-President
of the United States of America, Honorable John Nance
Garner, behind me, and senators, and cabinet members, and
governors from the states that are Democratic, and I talked to
the whole goddam United States. Me nerves were all jumping.
I was cold all over. I'm telling you, you could see the sweat roll
down me back. Right then, me whole life passed before me eyes/'
McGuinness can think of few pleasanter ways to spend an
evening than to sit behind his bare and battered desk in the
clubhouse of the Greenpoint People's Regular Democratic
Organization accepting "contracts," the politician's word for
favors he agrees to fulfill, from his constituents. "I get one hell
of a kick out of that," he says. "Sometimes I even do favors for
people in Jersey." A New York district politician who concerns
himself with the welfare of the great unwashed on the Hudson's
west bank is breaking new ground in human brotherhood, but
McGuinness's high regard for his fellow man extends even
beyond New Jersey. One Christmas he put an advertisement in
the Brooklyn newspapers saying:

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 28

PETER J. MC GUINNESS

Democratic State Committeeman

Fifteenth Assembly District

and
Deputy Commissioner of Borough Works

Borough of Brooklyn

Extends Cordial Holiday Greetings

to the World

He thinks highly of the Jewish celebration of Yom Kippur, the
Day of Atonement on which the pious are supposed to make
some charitable gesture toward their enemies. When he first
heard of Yom Kippur, he sent a memorandum to the Jewish
members of his club instructing them to "do some nice favors for
Republicans and Socialists." McGuinness is a Roman Catholic,
but his favorite divine, until the man's death a few years ago,
was the Protestant evangelist Tom Noonan, who was known as
the Bishop of Chinatown and who ran what was perhaps the
best-known Bowery mission before the war. McGuinness admired
Noonan because Noonan had hit on the idea of doing favors
over the airwaves. Noonan had a Sunday revival program on one
of the local stations, and at the end of each program he would
plead with his listeners to give old clothing, shoes, eyeglass
frames, medicines, tinned food, and the like to his Bowery and
Chinatown missioners. "That was one hell of an idea," McGuin
ness says. "I never knew anyone who done so much for the
human race of people." McGuinness is probably the only man
who ever ran for sheriff on a program of making life more
agreeable for the prisoners under his care. In 1935, when he
sought the shrievalty in Kings County, he assured the voters
that the prisoners in the county jail would be happy and well
fed if he were elected. "Under me, they'll get better meenus," he
said in every speech. He was elected, and on his first day in
office he gave a New Year's party in the jail. He issued orders
that hot drinks be passed around before bedtime, that beef stew
be served no less than twice a week, and that carrots be served
at least every other day. This last innovation made all the papers.
McGuinness, who has a sure instinct for publicity, had called
in the reporters and announced it himself. "Carrots is eye food,"

sp The Big Hello

he said. "Mother of God, I figure we want them to be able to see
the straight and narrow when we spring them."

McGuinness is always in high spirits. Sometimes he finds it
impossible to contain his exuberance. On such occasions, he
begins by bouncing up and down in his chair; then he whistles
a few bars of jolly music, flicks some imaginary dust from the
shoulders of his coat with his finger tips, and rises to do a few
jig steps. "Jeez, *' m feeling spiffy today," he says when this mood
is upon him. "Don't mind me, pals. It's just me nature to whistle/'
Once he whistled and jigged in the midst of a solemn speech by
a fellow Alderman. He was asked if the interruption was a protest
of any sort. "Bejesus, no," he said. "You know me, pals the soul
of music. I even got a band on me hat." He calls everyone "pal,"
even people he has never met and is talking to on the telephone
for the first time. His good nature has endeared him not only to
the voters of Greenpoint and Brooklyn but to just about all the
working politicians in town. In the places they most often
gather City Hall, Foley Square, and the Borough Hall section
of Brooklyn no one else is so popular. For more than two
decades now, no social gathering of officeholders has been con
sidered a success unless McGuinness has attended and done some
unusual things with the English language. Before his feet began
to bother him a few years ago, he often led contingents of city
officials in the St. Patrick's Day parade, which he now watches
from a place of honor in the reviewing stand. Since 1921, he has
been master of ceremonies at the annual outing of city fathers
and city-news reporters at Traver's Island, Whitestone Landing,
or wherever. He is chairman of the Association of Past Aldermen
of the City of New York and an official of a half-dozen other
organizations in which politicians gather to honor themselves.

Among politicians, one good index of a man's standing is the
frequency with which he is asked to be an honorary pallbearer.
McGuinness is in greater demand for this service than anyone
else in the city. He must sometimes decide which of two or more
distinguished corpses he will escort to the grave on a given
morning. The roster of those who have enjoyed his company, at
funerals and elsewhere, over the years is long and impressive.
Those on it have included Alfred E. Smith, Franklin D. Roose-

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 30

velt, James A. Farley, Edward J. Flynn, William O'Dwyer, James
A. Walker, and such reformers as Fiorello La Guardia, Newbold
Morris, Herbert Lehman, Samuel Seabury, and Robert Moses.
The late B. Charney Vladeck, a Socialist alderman from the
lower East Side and a man who generally classed Democratic
officeholders with sweatshop proprietors and exploiters of child
labor, was one of his warmest admirers. "That Irisher!" Vladeck
used to say. "Sometimes he makes me wish I was a Democrat."
McGuinness cultivates his friendships in many ways. He won
Vladeck's favor by giving Democratic sponsorship to a number of
Socialist resolutions. "Many's the time/' he says, "I used to say,
'Cheeny, old pal, if you got something you really want to get
through this here board, give it to me, and I'll make it Irish for
you. I figure what the hell, if something was good enough for
Cheeny, it was good enough for the other aldermen. Cheeny give
me a lot of contracts to put through, and all the Democrats
thought they were mine and voted for them." McGuinness is by
no means innocent of the uses of flattery. Some of it is a bit on
the sly side, as a typical and self-explanatory piece of his corre
spondence shows:

BOROUGH OF BROOKLYN
DEPARTMENT OF BOROUGH WORKS

Hon. Newbold Morris, President
Office of the President of the Council
City Hall, New York

Dear Pal Newbold,

I am in receipt of your splendid letter, and feeling as I do it
was most welcome. I was just speaking of you to Judge MacCrate and
Judge Lockwood, and we were discussing what a fine fellow you are.

I consider you my very dearest pal, and the way you accept some
of my friends who have had occasion to request favors and have been
advised by them of the wonderful reception they get from you.

Newbold, old pal, no words can express my proper feelings and
thoughts about you, and while the sun is shining on the Great Irish,
the sun will shine on us two, while we are enjoying that splendid
luncheon at the Yale Club and basking in our wonderful friendship..

Your pal,
Pete

PETER J. MCGUINNESS

The Big Hello

Newbold Morris is the city's ranMng Republican and by far
its most ardent evangel of municipal reform. He finds McGuin-
ness irresistible and frequently has him to the Yale Club.
McGuinness, for his part, gets along well with the reform ad
ministration headed by La Guardia and Morris. "The Little
Flower is a most splendid gentleman/' he said once in a speech
in Greenpoint. "Under him, we know the poor people of this
city will be looked after, irregardless of what may befall. What
he done he done honest and he done good/' Unlike many other
Democrats, though, McGuinness never felt the need to turn his
back on Jimmy Walker. When Walker returned pretty much in
disgrace from Paris in 1952, McGuinness met him at a Brooklyn
pier, threw his arms around him, and said, in the presence of
the press, "Jimmy darling, me old pal, stay in Brooklyn if they
won't give you a job over there. I'm sheriff here, and you can
be me first deputy, me dear old pork chop."

To reciprocate the affection that other men in public life have
shown for him, McGuinness honors them by voting them in as
members of the Grand Benevolent Order of Pork Chops, a
fraternal organization of large but uncounted membership, all
of it elected by him. Whenever he meets a member, he says,
"Hello there, me old pork chop!" He founded the G.B.O.P.C.
twenty years ago, when he was an alderman. "It's just a kind of
a humorous thing I thought up," he says reluctantly, when
pressed for an explanation. "What the hell, I had to have some
thing to call me best pals. I call them pork chops because all the
old aldermen loved eating pork chops/' The G.B.O.P.C. has
held only one formal meeting. That was in 1931, upon the
occasion of McGuinness's retirement from the Board of Alder
men. The Board adjourned its regular meeting, and after several
nonmembers had been admitted to the chamber, reconvened as
the Pork Chops. There were many testimonials to McGuinness,
and he was presented with a gold watch, a chain, and a charm
that he describes as "a gold statue of a pork chop." The Grand
Master of the G.B.O.P.C. is Isidor Frank, a wholesale butcher who
gives Democratic district leaders generous discounts on the
turkeys and chickens they distribute to the poor at Thanksgiving
and Christmas.

McGuinness is an anachronism. His approach to politics was

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 3*

outdated before he was born. His language went out along with
cops in jardiniere hats. His face seems improbable in the mid-
twentieth century. Newspaper cartoonists say they can get a
perfect caricature of the old-time boss by drawing the contem
porary McGuinness true to life, which in fact seems larger than
life. Nast and Keppler, they maintain, never created anything
half so plausible as McGuinness. He stands just under six feet
and weighs about 230 pounds, which is forty pounds less than he
weighed three years ago, when his physician ordered him to
reduce. He has a massive head, clear blue eyes, and a complexion
a shade or two off ripe tomato. His hair is pure white yet still
plentiful He parts it neatly in the middle and scallops it daintily
over his forehead in the roach style affected by bartenders fifty
years ago. His nose and chin are huge, granitic affairs that jut
far out from their moorings in the face and then tilt sharply
upward. The face, all in all, seems the work of a sculptor of large
and noble intentions but either imprecise or cunningly ambigu
ous execution. McGuinness can look as benign as Old King Cole
or Kriss Kringle in a nursery book or as hostile and belligerent as
Roughie McToughie, the generic hard guy. He dramatizes his
belligerence much as he dramatizes his spiffy moods. He clenches
his immense fists, crouches forward in his seat, and starts jabbing
sharply at an imaginary antagonist. "You louse-bound bastard,
you," he says to the shadow he is boxing. "Who you think you're
talking to? Huh?" Before he was elected alderman for the first
time, in 1919, he had spent fourteen years as a teamster, a lum
beryard worker, and a boss stevedore, and had earned money on
the side as a professional boxer, a distance runner, and a
bouncer in the barroom of a Hudson River steamer. In those
pursuits, he developed a hard, agile body which has taken on
weight without becoming slovenly. McGuinness does not look
fat. He looks beefy, powerful, massive, and stately. He carries
his body and his head erect. His walk is slow, lordly, and rather
ponderously graceful. Unlike the politicians of the era to which
he seems to belong, he is anything but flashy in dress. He favors
gray tweed suits, white shirts, quietly patterned blue ties, and
gray felt hats. He wears black high-top shoes and white cotton
socks. He owns no stickpins, and while he values the statue of

-2 The Big Hello

a pork chop, he seldom wears it. He does not need the trappings
of regality, for he is regal in bearing. His only ring is a solid
gold one, set with a garnet, which was given to him thirty-five
years ago by his wife, Margaret, a handsome woman of propor
tions almost as heroic as his own. He speaks of her, as a rule, as
"the old Champeen." They have one son, George, an Internal
Revenue agent, who is thirty-five and bigger than either of them.
The members of McGuinness's club once raised a thousand dollars
and bought him a ring with an enormous sparkler, but although
they had bought the largest band the jeweler stocked, it would
not fit on any of his fingers, which are as big around as pick
handles. "Bless us, but it don't even go on the pinky/' he said in
his speech at the presentation ceremony, trying to make the
best of an awkward situation. He could have had it enlarged but
did not do so. The possession of it is an embarrassment to him.
He keeps the ring at home and has spent several years debating
the propriety of having the stone set in a ring for Mrs. McGuin-
ness. "Maybe I should sell it and buy a nice pool table for the
club," he says.

McGuinness has a silver tongue and loves to work it. In his
twelve years on the Board of Aldermen, he missed only two
meetings. He made a speech at almost every one he attended,
generally a long speech. "There's nothing I liked like giving a
hot spiel," he says. "I guess me pals are glad I don't do that
any more. I was getting to be a gasbag." Years of windjammer
oratory have had a curious effect on him, not unlike the effect
of too many blows to the head on a fighter. He is speech-drunk.
Just as an old pug will come out swinging at the sound of a
dinner bell, so McGuinness will break into a speech at the
mention of George Washington, Pope Pius XII, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, or any other name that is hallowed in his kind of
politics. Sometimes he will declaim merely to fill in a gap in
conversation. One wintry afternoon, not long ago, he was talking
with several friends when someone came in out of the cold,
rubbed his hands together, and observed that it was a good day
for a cup of hot soup. Everyone nodded or mumbled agreement.
Then, since that subject seemed pretty well covered, an uneasy
silence followed. Before it "had gone too far, McGuinness broke

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 34

it with close to ten minutes of rhetoric on soup, the theme being
that the malaise of our times might be due in large measure to
the lack of the nourishing, character-building soup brewed by
American womanhood in braver, happier days. His conversa
tional voice is low and rather scratchy because of the wear and
tear it has had over the years. Often, when he is trying to drive
home a point, he speaks in a hoarse, confidential whisper, as
though he were talking in church. Before an audience, however,
his tones are clear and resonant and have a volume comparable
to that of the late Joe Humphries, the fight announcer who could
fill Madison Square Garden without the use of any mechanical
devices. The strength of his larynx muscles, like the strength of
all his other muscles, is the subject of tall tales in Greenpoint. In
one of them, as reported in the Weekly Star, McGuinness was
speaking over WNYC, the municipal station, when the trans
mitter suddenly lost all its power: "Peter raised his voice slightly
and came in strong and clear in Greenpoint."

McGuinness is one of the most successful pork-barrel raiders
in the city. He has got Greenpoint many millions of dollars'
worth of playgrounds and public baths, one of the two largest
swimming pools in the city, a first-rate dispensary, a nurses' home,
a new high school, and an incinerator. These are largely the
fruits of eloquence. One of his most notable achievements was
keeping a ferry running for thirteen years after it had ceased
paying for itself. For a half-century, this ferry service to East
Twenty-third Street provided Greenpoint with its only direct
communication with Manhattan. Chiefly because most people
who now live in Greenpoint work in its factories, the ferry's
patronage declined to a point at which it was no longer used
enough to justify its operation. Nevertheless, McGuinness was
determined that it should be continued for the few who did
commute on it and for those who rode it on summer evenings to
keep cool. Every year he appeared before the Board of Estimate
to appeal for its continuance and every year he was successful.
Once, addressing himself to Jimmy Walker, who as mayor
presided over the Board meetings and cast three of the Board's
eight votes, he concluded a long speech by saying, "Please don't

55 The Big Hello

take away the old ferry, Mr. Mayor. It would be like separating
an old couple that has been together for years to divorce
Manhattan and Greenpoint. There would be tears of sorrow In
the eyes of the old ferryboats as there would be tears in the eyes
of the people of Greenpoint if them splendid old boats were put
to rot in some dry dock or sold at public auction. Tell me, Mr.
Mayor, now tell me, that you will love them old ferryboats in
December as you did in May." (Walker was the author of a
maudlin song entitled "Will You Love Me in December as You
Did in May.") "I do love them, Peter, and I love you. You're my
favorite alderman," Walker said. The ferries kept running.

The next year McGuinness came up with the intelligence that
the boats were valuable relics; they had, he claimed to have
learned, been used as Union troop transports on the Mississippi
in the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, he said, "would turn over in
the sod" if the ferries were discontinued and destroyed. (McGuin
ness is still fighting the Civil War, in which his mother's father,
Major James Fee, was killed. He dislikes the South. "I don't like
that Jim Crow they got," he says, "and I don't like their goddam
white crow no better.") Another year he said that the ferries
would be the only means of escape from Greenpoint, in the main
a community of frame buildings, in the event of fire. "Listen,
pal," he told Mayor John P. O'Brien, "if somebody set fire to
Greenpoint and them old boats weren't there, we'd all be roasted
alive." The ferries ran.

In 1933, a year in which appeals to sentiment and history were
largely unavailing, the service was at last suspended. The melan
choly event was noted in the Weekly Star by Anon:

THE OLD FERRY

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down
For fifty years it's flown
And many a heart in Greenpoint
Will raise a heartfelt moan.
Upon her decks on many a morn
The crowds have rushed to work,
To reach Manhattan's dingy isle
In fog or rain or murk.

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 36

Her pilot oft has gripped the wheel

To breast the river's tide,

While Pete McGuinness, glad, looked on

It was his greatest pride.

On many a summer's evening

It took the kids in tow,

The little ones of Greenpoint

Who had no place else to go.

O better that her aged hulk
Should ne'er be seen again
Brave Peter fought to save it
But all alas in vain.

Drydock her somewhere down the stream
And strip her to the keel.
You can't imagine anyhow
How sad the people feel.

McGuinness knows the uses of irony as well as of sentiment.
Once, in the late twenties, his leadership was briefly threatened
by the appearance of a brash young attorney who argued that a
forward-looking community should have as its leader a person of
culture and refinement, such as himself. The Higher Learning
was enjoying immense prestige at the time, and the newcomer
was impressing a good many Democratic voters with his Brooklyn
Law School vocabulary. McGuinness, whose only diploma was
acquired when he finished the eighth grade at Public School
Number 31, disposed of the interloper with a strategy that is
still a favorite with connoisseurs. The young man challenged him
to a debate, and McGuinness accepted. After the challenger had
finished his erudite presentation, McGuinness, who had not yet
been invited to the Yale Club, rose and glared down at the
audience of shirt-sleeved laborers and housewives in Hoover
aprons. Then he bellowed, "All of yez that went to Yales or
Cornells raise your right hands." Not a hand went up. There was
some tittering in the audience. "The Yales and Cornells can
vote for him," he said. "The rest of yez vote for me." They did.

McGuinness is a working politician. As a rule, he is content
to leave questions of theory to the theoreticians. He also has a
strong sense of jurisdictional propriety and comments only rarely

37 The Big Hello

on national and international issues. He is an interested observer
of the passing show, though, and he now and then applies his
busy mind to matters of high policy. He watched the rise of
Hitler with deepening anxiety, and he believes that the Green-
point People's Regular Democratic Organization was the first
political club in the country to pass an anti-Hitler resolution.
He could be right. It took the form of a telegram to President
von Hindenburg early in 1933 advising him to yield no further
powers to Hitler and to take steps to assure his personal security.
McGuinness says that his reading of the news from Germany
had convinced him that Hitler was personally plotting the assassi
nation of Hindenburg, and claims to be certain that Hinden-
burg's death in 1934 was at Hitler's hand. "I knew all along what
that one was up to," he says. "1*11 go to me own grave knowing
he killed the old gentleman." Not long ago, he took a stand
against the appointment of Jesse Jones as chairman of the Re
construction Finance Corporation. "I got it figured out why they
want him," he said. "He's a rich cheapskate. He'd never let go
of any of the money. God bless us, we don't want a piker in a
job like that." All during the North African phase of the late
war, he disapproved of our collaboration with General Henri
Giraud, whom he held personally responsible for the misfortune
that befell General Mark Clark when, at the secret conference
before the invasion, he lost his trousers and the $18,000 they
contained. "I'm down on that crowd," he says. "That was a hell
of a thing, them letting that happen. Any decent leader, when he
gets someone like General Clark coming into his district, the least
he can do is make sure no one rolls him while he's there." In
another recent foray into national affairs, McGuinness aligned
himself with those favoring the release from prison of Earl
Browder, the Communist leader. "I say let him out," McGuin
ness told an inquiring reporter a while back. "There's lots worse
than him. He's got a very good job with the Communists."

Like most district leaders, McGuinness has managed to keep
himself on the public payroll most of the time. In addition to
being an alderman, he has been sheriff of Kings County and
county register, and at present he is assistant commissioner of
Borough Works in Brooklyn. In one sense, his current job is a

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 38

comedown, since it pays only $7,900 a year. The shrievalty paid
$15,000 and the register's job paid $12,000. The offices of county
sheriff and county register, however, were abolished three years
ago on the ground that they served no useful purpose. On the
very day in 1941 that the voters of Kings County elected McGuin-
ness their county register, the voters of New York State adopted
a constitutional amendment doing away with the office. McGuin-
ness had to take his present job, an appointive one, as the next-
best thing. He assumed it in 1944, upon the death of the incum
bent. "I don't mind the money part/' he says. "I don't drink nor
gamble none, and me and the old Champeen got to go easy on
potatoes." As for his responsibilities, he enjoys them because they
are so few in number. "I like this here work pretty good. It
don't keep me tied down none," he told a friend not long ago.
The Department of Borough Works is charged with the main
tenance of streets, sewers, and public buildings. It is run by civil
engineers, and most of its employees are engineers and laborers.
McGuinness does not pretend to be an expert on public works,
although having once worked in a lumberyard, he considers him
self something of an authority on the Coney Island boardwalk
and inspects it often. "I trample it now and then to make sure it
ain't rotten," he says. He has an office in the Borough Hall, and
he spends two or three hours a day in it, but most of that time is
spent working on his contracts. He has no qualms of conscience
whatever about holding a job that involves little work. He feels
that his real service to society is the one he performs as a political
leader in Greenpoint, and he regards his being on the municipal
payroll merely as a technical device to give him the money to
carry on. It is a public subsidy for an enterprise of public utility.
"The thing of it is," he says thoughtfully, "you got to make jobs
like this so a political man can get his work done. If I was still
in a lumberyard or if I was in a factory, I wouldn't have time to
run Greenpoint." The Citizens Union disapproves of him and of
his attitude and feels that he has no right to be at the public
trough. "The record clearly indicates that he is not qualified
for any public office," it declares each time he seeks one. McGuin
ness does not take this seriously. "They mean I ain't a Republi
can," he says. "Bejesus, that's right." Robert Moses, a sometime

jp The Big Hello

Republican who does have the approval of the Citizens Union
and one who has given a lot of thought to such matters, sides
with McGuinness. "It's absurd/' he says, "to expect a man like
Peter to be an administrator. Peter is a leader and one of the
best in the city. Call him a boss if you want I don't care. I've
known him and worked with him for twenty years, and when
ever I've needed to know anything about Greenpoint, I've got
more practical help and co-operation from Peter than I could
ever have got from a hundred social workers, sociologists, city
planners, poll takers, and all the rest of that trash. No matter
what you say about them, men like Peter have held New York's
neighborhood together, and if the reformers ever succeed in
driving them out, take my word for it, this city is going to fall
apart into racial and religious mobs. If you ask me, that's
happening right now."

McGuinness may spend only a few hours a day at his Borough
Hall office, but his working hours can be long and arduous. He
is up by seven, and by eight has started on a long round of
errands. Some days he travels mostly by foot, bus, subway, and
trolley; other days he is chauffeured around in one of the auto
mobiles at the disposal of the Borough President. He may stop
in a doctor's office or a hospital to arrange for the care of an
ailing constituent, attend one or two funerals, pay his respects
to a bereaved family, argue with some constituent's landlord
about heating problems or unpaid rent, run down a loose-footed
husband and try to persuade him to return to his lawful wife,
arrange with the head of a city bureau to shift an employee from
night to day work, and call upon several public agencies to clear
up various problems of widows' and veterans' pensions, Social
Security, Workmen's Compensation, service allotments, old-age
insurance, or any of the other government business that brings
the poor so much closer to politicians than the well-to-do. He
also visits a good many courts and police stations on his tour,
and the possibility exists that he now and then tampers with
justice. He is reluctant to say very much about his transactions
with officers of the courts and of the law; he considers that his
function is at least related to that of an attorney, and he feels
that he must keep his clients' confidences inviolate. "I never talk

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 4 o

about me people's troubles/' he says. "But you know how it is.
You're walking along the street, and somebody you don't even
know bunks into you. So you give him the back of your hand, and
he comes back for more. One of that kind you know. You give
him another, and he's back again. You belt him good, and then
some goddam patrolman busts in and takes the two of yez down
to the station. He don't know who started it, so it's drunk and
disorderly, the two of yez. What the hell are you going to do? All
the nerves in your body are jumping. Your pulse is trobbing
hard. You're cold all over. You're thinking you ain't got a friend
in the world. Then it comes to you. 'I'll call Peter McGuinness/
you say to yourself. 'He'll get me out of this.' Bejesus, I got to
give you a hand on a proposition like that." Not all of his inter
ventions are on behalf of drunks or occasional street-brawlers.
Though he does not care to discuss it much, he is willing to
give a hand on more serious propositions. When pressed to
explain his point of view, he will do so. "Murder, rape, and
robbery with a gun them I never touch," he said recently. "But
something like housebreaking what the hell, the first couple
times don't prove there's anything wrong with a boy."

Once every week or two, McGuinness spends a whole day in
Greenpoint, covering his district on foot. He checks on such
matters of public interest as garbage collection, playground ad
ministration, compliance with the tenement laws, the efficiency
of the Fire and Police Departments, and the condition of the
pavements. If he sees or hears of anything wrong a stopped-up
sewer, a hole in the pavement, or traffic on a play street he gets
in touch with the appropriate authorities. Often he works with
Iris nose. Greenpoint is today the most heavily industrialized
part of the city, and among its products are soap, varnish, gaso
line, and other things whose manufacture is malodorous. One of
McGuinness's many boasts is that he has made Greenpoint smell
better. He has forced factory owners to install devices that
-eliminate objectionable smells and smoke, and he is constantly
sniffing for new evidences of polluted air. As soon as he detects an
unpleasant odor on the wind, he calls the manager of the offend
ing plant and threatens to hail him into court for violating a
whole series of city ordinances.

4i The Big Hello

The close watch McGuinness has kept on Greenpoint has
produced some unexpected dividends. During the 1936 Presi
dential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke in Greenpoint.
Before he was introduced, he confided in McGuinness that he
was troubled by the Literary Digest straw vote, in which Gover
nor Alfred M. Landon, the Republican candidate, was well in
the lead. "That was one of me very biggest moments," McGuin
ness says. "I told him, I said, 'Mr. President, don't you go giving
it another thought. I got that goddam fake figured out/ " The
President asked McGuinness what he meant. McGuinness ex
plained that he had recently assigned three reliable members of
the Greenpoint People's Regular Democratic Organization to
spy on the city incinerator in the district. Some constituents who
lived near the incinerator had complained that horses were
being cremated there. They were certain they had detected the
stink of burning horseflesh. The McGuinness followers spent
three nights hiding in some bushes near the plant to see if
horses were being cremated there, and they discovered that every
night, after the Sanitation Department trucks had dumped their
loads, some men they knew to be Republican party workers were
coming in and buying up stacks of paper. Closer snooping showed
that they were collecting discarded Literary Digest ballots. "Mr.
President/' McGuinness said to Roosevelt, "the people of
Brooklyn get them fake ballots, and they trun them right out.
The Republicans go to the incinerator and buy them for a
nickel a piece. That's why Landon's ahead/' Roosevelt laughed.
Later in the campaign, he sent word to McGuinness, through
Jim Farley, that he was no longer worrying about the straw vote.
"He thanked me for relieving his brain/' McGuinness says.
"Bejesus, you feel good when you do a thing like that."

McGuinness gets to Borough Hall at about noon each day.
He stays there until two-thirty or three, checking up on his
contracts, welcoming constituents who find it more convenient
to see him there than at the Clubhouse, and passing the time of
day with old friends. Early in the afternoon, he goes across the
street to the press room in the Supreme Court Building, where he
spends an hour or so catching up on political gossip, general
news, and sitting in on the all-day rummy game there. These

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 42

visits often yield a feature story for the next day's papers. Over
the years, McGuinness has made the papers more often than
public figures of far higher rank, for his attitudes and his lan
guage, even when bowdlerized slightly, are almost always some
where off the beaten political track. He leaves for Greenpoint
not later than five, dines at home with Mrs. McGuinness, and
then walks to the Greenpoint People's Regular Democratic Or
ganization, a three-story frame building just around the corner
from his own house, which is very much like it. His desk is in a
corner of a large, gloomy room decorated with some blown-up,
tinted portraits of McGuinness with his arms around Jimmy
Walker; a faded pennant bearing the name and likeness of Frank
lin D. Roosevelt; and a huge picture of McGuinness as a brawny
young dock walloper. He sits down at his desk ready for what
ever the evening will bring. Constituents start arriving shortly
after six and wait their turn in straight-backed chairs in a room
adjoining his office. These chairs, aside from a couple of small,
plain tables, and McGuinness's desk, chair, and safe are the only
furnishings on the main floor of the club. McGuinness, who
admires a touch of color in his surroundings, would like his
clubhouse to be cheerier, but he says it would be foolish for the
Organization to spend much money on furniture or decorations.
"The fellows that come in here," he says, "get to talking about
baseball and things like that, and you never know what's going
to happen, especially on a Saturday night. We keep the girls'
room upstairs fixed up real nice, but down here it wouldn't pay."
The club telephone is kept in a padlocked squirrel cage, which
McGuinness has to unlock every time the phone rings.

McGuinness stays in the club until twelve thirty or one. He
may see anywhere from a dozen to a hundred people before ten
o'clock, but not many show up after that. Still, he feels that he
should stay. "You never know when there'll be a late straggler/'
he explains. At about nine, some friends arrive and set up a
rummy game, in which he takes a hand whenever he can. Most
of his clients want the kind of routine favors he has done for
others earlier in the day. The services he offers make him a com
bined attorney, job broker, accountant, and social worker. He
also, now and then, serves as a domestic-relations court. "It's one

42 The Big Hello

of the greatest happinesses In me life," he likes to say, "to think
of all the husbands and wives I've kept together." His matri
monial advice to husbands consists almost entirely of variations
on one theme: "The old girl is always best." "When it's the
missus who's beefing," he says, "I give her the old song A Good
Man Is Hard to Find."

McGuinness was born in Greenpoint on June 29, 1888. His
father was a brass polisher, and there were thirteen children in
the family besides Peter James, who was the third to be born.
The family was not poor. The elder McGuinness owned his own
home, and when he died, twenty years ago, he left an estate of
about $20,000, none of which went to Peter, because, he says,
his father was ashamed of having a politician in the family. He
had wanted Peter to follow in his footsteps as a brass polisher.
"To the old gentleman," McGuinness says, "there was no job in
the world as good as brass polishing. I never seen it that way."
McGuinness's career in politics began when he was eight years
old and became a junior ward heeler for State Senator Pat
McCarren, then the boss of Greenpoint and for many years the
boss of all Brooklyn. From the time he was five or six, he had
worked at odd jobs in the neighborhood. He ran errands for
storekeepers, carried growlers of beer for workingmen, and sold
the eggs of some hens he kept in the back yard. On weekends he
served as the standard-bearer for a marching society known as
the Rinky Dinks. "The Rinks were a lot of young fellows around
the Point," he says. "All of them was keeping company with
girls, and the girls marched with them. Nobody wanted to leave
his young lady friend to carry the flag, so they hired me to do
it." By the time he was ten, McGuinness was well known through
out Greenpoint. "I was pals with the whole town," he says.
"When I wasn't working or in school, I used to sit in the gutter
on Greenpoint Avenue, the corner of Norman. That way I got
to know everybody because everybody came by there. People
would come along and say, 'Bejesus, there's Petey McGuinness in
the gutter. Hello, Petey me boy, what are you doing today?' I'd
say, 'Oh, I'm fine, thank you, Mr. Flaherty. I was just sitting in the
gutter here because it's so nice and sunny* How are you today,

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT ^

Mr. Flaherty? And Mrs. Flaherty?' Even in them days, I was out
there giving them the big hello." One of M cCarren's men, taking
note of McGuinness's politeness and of his good standing in the
community, took him on as a doorbell ringer. On Election Day
in 1896, McGuinness made a dollar for getting out thirty or forty
votes for Bryan and Free Silver. Each election and primary day
he did the same thing, and between elections he was a chore boy
for the local Democratic organization, the Jefferson Club. "1
knew I liked that kind of work the best/' he said. "I was always
a great one for anything that had to do with people."

When he was fourteen and had completed the eighth grade at
P. S. 31, McGuinness left school, and though he continued to live
in Greenpoint and to work in the local Democratic machine, he
ferried to work every day in Manhattan. He was an office boy for
R. H. Hoe 8c Company, the printing-press manufacturers; then a
runner on the Bowery, delivering Thomas J. Plunkitt's Cele
brated Cigars to the Chatham Club, Steve Brodie's, McGurk's
Suicide Hall, and other well-known resorts of the period. Every
thing about McGuinness's speech and appearance suggests the
old Bowery, but he never considered himself a Bowery Boy.
"There was some splendid people on the Bowery in them days/'
he says, "such as Chuck Connors and Big Tim Sullivan, but I
never thought too much of the place. I'm a neighborhood man
myself, and the Bowery wasn't really what you'd call a neighbor
hood. It wasn't so tough as they say, neither. Right now Green-
point is tougher than the Bowery ever was, and it's a decent place,
too." Later, when he grew old enough for man's work, he became
a teamster for S. Brinckerhoff Hay & Feed, and worked evenings
keeping order in the saloon of a Hudson River steamboat. He was
also, for a time, a promising young middleweight. He won thir
teen of his fifteen fights and drew two. He left the ring partly
because he could not see how it could contribute to his political
advancement and partly because, much as he enjoys fighting for
fun and honor, he is not the sort to punch people for money.
He says that he likes a job in which he can feel that he is serving
his fellows, and he sometimes classifies the various political
offices he has held according to the opportunities they have
offered for social usefulness. Thus, he did not enjoy being

^5 The Big Hello

sheriff of Kings County nearly as much as he liked being an
alderman. "Being a sheriff and arresting people isn't a very
loving thing," he says. "When you sum it all up, I'd say that
alderman was about the most loving job I ever had."

On the whole, McGuinness is sorry he did not get more
schooling. He believes in education. He particularly favors the
liberal arts and for many years fought for the building of a high
school in Greenpoint. "It's a shameful crime/' he once told the
Board of Estimate, "that the greatest mercantile center this side
of the Mississippi should have no high school for its young ones.
Woe be to him or they who will stand in the way of onward
progress of the boys and girls of Greenpoint/' In time he won,
but the victory was not as sweet as it might have been, for
the handsome school that was built turned out to be the Auto
motive Trades High School. He regarded this as an affront, and
undemocratic. He seems to feel that the assumption behind it
was that since Greenpoint is a working-class district, it can breed
nothing but mechanics. "The crumbs thought they put some
thing over on us/' he says. "I'm going to get me another high
school in here before I'm through, and this time we're going to
get an educational school." In one way, though, he considers it
fortunate that his own schooling ended when it did. He had his
heart set on a political career, and education might have helped.
But he wanted to become a district boss as soon as possible and
to spend no more time than necessary in the service of some other
boss. By making a name for himself, as he did in his early twen
ties, outside the regular machine, he was able to become a full-
fledged leader at thirty-six; he feels that if he had gone to high
school or college, he might have been tempted to take a political
job immediately upon graduation and then wait his turn for the
leadership in the hierarchy of the Jefferson Club, which, like
most hierarchies, was rigidly based on seniority. In that case, he
might have spent the better part of his life as a timeserver in a
municipal office or perhaps in the state legislature or Congress.
No thought appalls him more. Like most politicians of his
generation, McGuinness considers Congressmen members of an
inferior class. To him, the local bosses who pick the legislators
and tell them what to do are the elite of politics, and Congress-

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 46

men are men, to give them the benefit of the doubt, who, unable
to make the grade as leaders themselves, must serve as legislative
errand boys to the bosses. He cannot understand the tendency,
comparatively recent in this city, of political bosses to take
Congressional nominations for themselves. "I'd never be such
a sap as to send meself to Washington/' he says, and "believe me,
I'm glad I was never in a fix where anyone else could send me.
I'm asking you, if a man's a leader in New York, what the hell
business has he got being in Washington?"

Long before McGuinness became political boss of Green-
point, he was boss of its water front. In 1908, when he was
twenty, he gave up his career on the Bowery and started as a
lumber handler and stevedore in the John C. Orr Lumber Yard
in Greenpoint. He was soon a rising figure in Lumber Handlers'
Local 955 of the International Longshoremen's Association and
in time was known throughout the section as the toughest of all
the dock wallopers. "You could just about say," an associate of
those days recalls, "that Peter was the king of this here water
front right down to the Navy Yard and even Irishtown and
Brooklyn Bridge. He could work better than anyone, and he
could lick anyone." Early in his career, he had a chance to bring
himself dramatically to the attention of his fellow longshoremen.
He caught a pair of crooked union delegates in the act of splitting
up the swag. "It was at a meeting of the local in Germania Hall,"
he recalls. "I was in the Gents' Room. I was sitting down. These
two delegates come in and start talking. They don't know no
one is there. I'm a son of a bitch, they're divvying up one hundred
thirty-two bucks they just took in dues. The sweat's running down
me back. I pull up me pants and go for them. I flang one of
them through a glass panel door and knocked the other cold.
Then I marched them into the room where the Lumber Handlers
was. Me and a friend made them empty their pockets on the
table. They come up with a hundred and fifty. I made a motion
we teach them a lesson by using the other eighteen for beer and
bologna sandwiches for the whole local. Me friend seconded it,
and it passed unanimous." Before the meeting was adjourned for
the beer and sandwiches, there was a purge of the Local 955
leadership, and McGuinness got the first of several promotions.

47 The Big Hello

He says that Ms fight with the delegates was one of the very few
serious fights he ever had. "We had fights almost every day/' he
says, "but they were just for fun. Besides, you had to do that to
become boss in them days. The others figured that if they could
lick me they could be boss theirselves. Most of the time we'd
fight at lunch hour or after work. Everybody'd stand around and
watch. After the fights I'd practice me oratory. I'd stand on a pile
of lumber and give them all a hot spiel on something Irish
liberty or George Washington, something like that. Me friends
would say, 'Bejesus, Peter, you're improving every day. Pretty
soon we'll be after sending you to the Board of Aldermen/ "

McGuinness greatly enjoyed the ten years he spent working in
the lumberyard, and he regards lumber handling as one of the
pleasantest occupations he knows. "Working in a lumberyard is
like being in a health resort all year long/' he says. "You're out
there in God's good air all the day long, and from the smell of
the different woods, you might as well be in a forest. And another
thing you're in with the most splendid people. I never knew a
higher-class type men than lumber handlers/' Not long ago, he
told a group of reporters in the Supreme Court press room that
he wished to make a suggestion on peacetime military training.
"If they was to leave this conscription thing up to me/' he said,
"I'd have the boys putting in a couple of years in lumberyards.
It builds up every muscle in your body. Lumber handlers are the
toughest men on earth. Bejesus, if the Russians or somebody knew
they'd be up against lumber handlers, they wouldn't start no
trouble."

Today McGuinness is a pillar of the Brooklyn Democracy and
will tolerate no irregularity. In his youth he was a seditionist. In
1919, the boss of Greenpoint was James A. McQuade, who en
joyed a brief celebrity during the Seabury investigation, when
he explained his bank deposits of more than a half-million
dollars by saying that he had borrowed the money to feed "the
thirty-three starving McQuades/' McQuade was a short, squat,
and essentially drab Irishman who spent most of his time at the
race tracks and in the saloons of Greenpoint, places that McGuin
ness never patronized. McGuinness was frank and naturally
exuberant; McQuade was inclined to be sly and lugubrious.

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 48

Nevertheless, McQuade was a reasonably popular leader and was
powerfully entrenched. When McGuinness was getting his start
in politics, he knew that if he accepted patronage from McQuade,
he could not become boss himself until McQuade retired or
died, and at the moment either event seemed remote. He
therefore undertook to overthrow McQuade, a job that took him
six years and was regarded by those who watched it as a master
piece of insurrection.

At the beginning of the war between the McQuade and
McGuinness forces, Greenpoint was a discontented neighbor
hood. In the late nineteenth century, it had been a happy and
reasonably prosperous community more, in fact, a town than a
section of a city. (McGuinness and many of its citizens claim that
it was the inspiration for "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old
Town Tonight/' It appears to be a fact that Theodore A. Metz
wrote the music while drinking beer in a saloon on Meserole
Avenue, but Joseph Hayden's lyric is generally assumed to refer
to St. Louis, and it sounds a good deal more St. Louisian than
Greenpointian. The atmosphere on Meserole Avenue, however,
may have helped Metz in contriving the sprightly lilt of the
music.) Its citizens, mainly Irish, worked in the lumber and ship
yards along the water front. It was an important shipbuilding
center. The Monitor, the odd little "cheese box on a raft" that
defeated the Merrimac in Hampton Roads in 1862, was built
there, and in its honor the principal hotel had been named the
Yankee Cheesebox. Most of its buildings were row houses, owned
by the people who lived in them, and there was ample open
space. Salt water could be seen from almost anywhere, for the
site was literally a "green point" in the waters of New York
Harbor. On the west was the East River; on the north and east
was Newtown Creek, a salty inlet that is shaped like a scythe, and
on the south another salty inlet that has since been mostly filled
in. But at the start of the new century, Greenpoint began to
change, both physically and economically. New York had grown
up all around it, so that it was no longer a village but almost the
exact geographical center of Greater New York. Its water front
was too valuable to stay in the hands of minor industries.
The sprawling ship and lumber yards were replaced by factories

49 The Big Hello

and oil refineries, and they brought about an influx of low-wage
immigrants, who in turn caused congestion. A hedge of smoke
stacks rose along the water front, shutting off the view and pour
ing out upon the residential section clouds of soot, smoke, and
smells. Property values fell. People who could afford to leave
Greenpoint did so. Few investors could be found to finance the
replacement or improvement of old property. The city was
reluctant to do much to benefit a residential community that
was degenerating so fast. One of Greenpoint's poets, a woman of
insight, wrote in a local paper:

Daily neighbors move to other sections
Where buildings rise in process of erection
Where bridges close and cars are ever moving
Where roads and all conditions are improving.

Yet, dear Greenpoint, noble town of fame
Year after year e'er remains the same
Through lack of unity to make a stand
To fight for the improvements we demand.

Oh, those on high who watch mere mortals act
Send us a fighter strong, clean, and intact,
That we may save our fair town from decay
And from the chains of unrest break away.

McGuinness began his attack on the McQuade machine by
blaming it for Greenpoint's plight and by becoming the "fighter
strong, clean, and intact/' for whom the poet Julia V. Conlon,
who was to join him as his first district coleader had called. The
press was his first forum. Every time he learned of a new grievance
in the community, he wrote a letter to one of the local newspapers
blaming McQuade and his organization. He held McQuade re
sponsible for Greenpoint's lack of playgrounds and schools, for
the deplorable condition of its pavements, for the smokes and
smells from the factories, for the garbage in Newtown Creek,
for gypsy encampments, and for the fact that livestock was being
herded through the streets of Greenpoint to the abattoirs of
Long Island City. His letters revealed the mastery of a concrete
and vivid prose style. "These animals/' he wrote of the cattle in
passage to slaughter, "knock over baby carriages with babies in

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 5 o

them, and they knock down Greenpoint mothers, and the bulls
kick them and knock them down, running into store windows
and kicking them and breaking them. Why does Greenpoint
have to put up with this? What's our dude leader Jim McQuade
and his Alderman and his Assemblyman doing to stop these
beasts?" Other neighborhoods, he complained, were getting pub
lic baths and showers, but Greenpoint, which was short on domes
tic plumbing, was not. "What's the matter with Park Avenue
Jim McQuade?" he demanded to know. "Don't he think his own
people are good enough to have baths and showers? What we
need around here is fighting leaders. Why shouldn't Greenpoint
be right up there with Flatbush and places like that?" McGuin-
ness also attacked John McCooey, the boss of Kings County and
a mighty eminence in New York thirty years ago, who supported
McQuade against the rebel McGuinness. Like all good politicians,
McGuinness pretended to be scornful of politicians in general
and presented himself merely as a long-suffering private citizen
who had been driven to action by corruption, abuse, sloth, and
official insolence. "I have to laugh," he wrote to the editor of the
Weekly Star, "when I think of these big bluffs of politicians
coming into this district around election time, getting on the
platform and telling the people what they will give them, and
when elected you will never see the old blowhards again. If you
ask me, all this is Mr. McCooey's work. Now, I say, let Mr.
McCooey and his officeholders refuse us these improvements, and
we'll show them what Greenpoint can do. Who is this McCooey,
anyway? Does anyone ever see him around Greenpoint? Our
motto here should be Greenpointers work for Greenpoint."
In 1918, McGuinness felt that the iron was hot enough for
striking. He announced that he would run against McQuade's
alderman, William McGarry, in the next year's Democratic
primary. When the Jefferson Club, for which he had worked
since childhood, barred him and his followers, then mostly his
fellow lumbermen, he defiantly organized what he called the
Open Air Democratic Club and held meetings on street corners.
He ran small ads in the Weekly Star: "The Man of the Hour.
Who Is He? Peter J. McGuinness." "Vote for the Man Who Will

5* The Big Hello

Bring Patronage to the District Peter J. McGuinness." One
display ad read:

GET ON THE LAUGH WAGON

Laugh.
The best tonic in the World is Happiness.

Laughter induces happiness,

and happiness is the theme of our existence.

McGuinness for Alderman

He continued to write letters to the editor, and he made himself
good copy. Innumerable items appeared in the Weekly Star.
"When you see Greenpoint's fighting candidate for Alderman,
Peter McGuinness, ask Peter why he don't eat macaroni. He's
got some answer." Or: "Jim McQuade had better watch out.
Peter McGuinness was down at the Du Tel Pleasure Club the
other night, and the boys say the Stormy Petrel of the North End
is really on the war path." He organized the Peter J. McGuinness
Greenpoint People's Regular Democratic Organization, the Peter
J. McGuinness Greenpoint Patriotic League, and the Peter J.
McGuinness Charity and Welfare Association. The first of these,
from whose title his own name was docked when he succeeded to
the district leadership, still exists. The others were wartime
organizations. McGuinness claimed that McQuade was not doing
enough to boost the morale of Greenpoint's soldiers. He ordered
his followers to canvass the neighborhood for money to buy
presents for the men going off to war. Naturally, this was a
popular cause. In that war, the drafted men entrained for camp
in public. Whenever a batch of Greenpoint boys left, they were
given a send-off by McGuinness and his partisans, carrying the
banners of all three McGuinness organizations, and by the Full
Military Brass Band of Professor William J. Connolly, a musi
cian who was, and still is, one of McGuinness's most important
political allies. Each draftee was presented by McGuinness with a
bon voyage package containing food, cigarettes, soap, razor
blades, and an inspirational leaflet by the candidate for alderman.
The soldiers continued to receive presents in camp and overseas,
and when they returned most of them joined the Greenpoint

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 52

Labor Veterans League, Peter J. McGuinness, Hon. President.
One local boy who claimed to be the first soldier from Green-
point to reach German soil wrote home a letter that was promi
nently displayed in the Weekly Star:

I was thinking [he wrote] of Greenpoint through every minute of it.
... In the last few months I've seen a lot of Greenpoint boys over
here. ... I find that most of the boys feel about the way I do. They
think that Peter ]. McGuinness is doing very good work for Green-
point. We sure hope he keeps it up and that Greenpoint appreciates
him.

It all paid off handsomely. McGuinness defeated the McQuade
incumbent in the primaries and was easily elected in November.
He worked as a stevedore until a couple of hours before he took
the oath of office.

McGuinness stayed an alderman until 1931, and for those
dozen years he was unquestionably the most celebrated member
of the Board. He makes the newspapers quite a bit nowadays,
but the volume of his publicity now that he is in Borough Hall
does not compare with what he got when he was in City Hall.
During the twenties, he was the subject of almost as many feature
stories as Daddy Browning, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, and Dr.
John Roach Straton. A comment by McGuinness on Prohibition,
the New Woman, or the war debts frequently accompanied by
a picture of the Alderman striking an aggressive pose alongside
MacMonnies' statue of Civic Virtue in City Hall Park was
almost a regular department in the afternoon papers. He liked
to give out statements defending New Yorkers against blue-
nose attacks on their city. His favorite adversary was the
Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals of the
Methodist Episcopal Church. McGuinness answered its every
charge. When it accused New Yorkers of general immorality, he
replied, "New York is the cleanest city on earth. You can't find
a more moral race of people anywhere." When New York's
theaters were under attack, he said, "The theatres of New York
are great educational institutions. Some people would be happy
if Broadway was a pasture. The hell with them. I'm for the
Great White Way/ 1 When New York language was said to be

53 The Big Hello

profane and obscene, McGuinness was irate. "There's no more
profanity here than In Peapatch. New Yorkers may swear a lot
on their impulses, but they never swear from the heart/' To the
complaint that New York women exposed too much of them
selves, McGuinness replied, "New York has the healthiest air in
the country. What if the girls do go in for few clothes. The good
air gets to their bodies and makes them healthier. Look at Adam
and Eve. They weren't all bundled up. Think how many descend
ants they had. Good night, there's no harm in women wearing
few clothes." There was recurrent controversy over his favorite
piece of statuary, Civic Virtue, and he was always in the thick of
it. He did not find its nudity offensive, but he once, with some
reporters, slipped a pair of red drawers on it. "Now he's decent,
I hope everybody'll stop knocking him," he said. When it was
moved to Foley Square, he took the floor in the Board of Alder
men and said, "It is noteworthy that the Municipal Art Com
mission placed that Immortal piece of art, Civic Virtue, in such
a heavenly retreat like Foley Square. I doff my hat to the Munic
ipal Art Commission and may it have long health and pleasant
dreams and may the sunshine always rest on its brow." For a
while, he girded his enormous stomach with a belt whose large
silver buckle had "Civic Virtue" engraved upon it.

The papers also followed his doings in Greenpoint. They
particularly favored his wars on gypsies and coolies. Green-
point was plagued with gypsy encampments during the twenties,
and once a local box factory used for its work force a contingent
of Chinese laborers who came in vans under cover of night and
slept, some three hundred of them, inside the factory. McGuin
ness had the law put a stop to this. The gypsies he went after
himself. Whenever they moved in, he and a group of his club
members would go to their camp and bellow, "Get out all of
yez." As a rule, they would follow his Instructions, and he would
issue a victory proclamation. "I hereby declare Greenpoint to be
free from Gypsies. There is nobody here now but Democrats and
some Republicans." But they kept coming back. "I will not
permit any gypsy troupes to settle in my district," he said. "They
frighten children, intimidate grownups, and steal at every op
portunity. They are a menace to the garden spot of the universe."

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 54

Once, after a successful drive against the gypsies in Greenpoint,
he invited their leaders to make peace with him and join him in
one of his current enthusiasms a demonstration against Prohibi
tion that was to be known as Jimmy Walker's Beer Parade. The
gypsies were pleased to join, and McGuinness strutted happily
at the head of their band. "They steal a lot, but bejesus they're
musically inclined/' he said.

New York contributed no more valiant or resourceful battler
than McGuinness to the war against the Eighteenth Amendment.
He probably made more attempts to find a legal way around
Prohibition than any other legislator in the country. "America
does not want to be a dry country/' he told his fellow aldermen.
"New York will never be arid. Let us keep the parched desert in
the torrid countries and permit New York and her sister states to
be peopled by real humans." No epidemic of grippe or head colds
could strike the city without McGuinness putting before the
Board a resolution petitioning Congress to "so amend the Prohibi
tion Law as to allow the sale of spirit liquors for the benefit of the
sick/' "It's a criminal shame/' McGuinness, himself a teetotaler,
said, "to allow whiskey to lie idle while people are lying at death's
door who could be saved by it." He worked Greenpoint up to
such a fury that it voted eighty to one for repeal the solidest
vote, he said, and probably correctly, in the country. He got the
name of Doughty Street in Greenpoint changed to Ruppert
Place, in honor of the brewing family.

McGuinness's most admired speech before the Board of Alder
men was delivered upon the occasion of Mrs. Ruth Preatt's resig
nation from the Board following her election to Congress. He
delivered a testimonial on behalf of his fellow aldermen, which
ended:

Ruth, all we have to say is that when you go down to Washington
you want to take along that beautiful fur coat that your dear husband
gave you. You want to take that coat to Washington, Ruth, because it's
very, very cold down there. Washington may be further South than
New York City, but the people there are cold as ice. They don't love
one another the way people here do. Why you know yourself, Ruth,
that here in the Board of Aldermen of the City of New York there
isn't a single man who if you were cold and unhappy couldn't put his

55 The Big Hello

arms around you and hug you and make you feel good. But you'll never
in your life find such loving hearts in Washington. I know, Ruthie
darling, because I been there and in the coldness down there I nearly
froze meself to death. So you'll sure need that coat, Ruthie me darling.

McGuinness was an early supporter o Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He likes to think of himself as one of the architects of the New
Deal. He asserts his claim by pointing to a series of resolutions,
sponsored by him in 1922, which gave what he calls the "per
dime" employees of the city paid holidays and sick leave. These
measures, which are, of course, negations of the idea of per diem
employment, were, he believes, forerunners of such legislation as
the National Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor
Relations Act. "When you look back on it," he says, "you can see I
was working on a lot of them humane matters meself twenty-five
years ago."

An example of his resourcefulness comparable to his saving of
the Greenpoint ferry was his campaign for farm gardens for the
children of Greenpoint. During World War I, a good deal of gar
dening was done in the city parks, parts of which were plowed up
and parceled out to amateur vegetable growers. McGuinness
found that the Greenpoint children enjoyed working in the
gardens, and when the war was over he persuaded the city ad
ministration to let them continue. After a few years, however,
when his skill at legislative maneuver was getting Greenpoint far
more than its share of appropriations for improvement, the
Board of Estimate began to rebel. To keep the gardens, McGuin
ness was in time forced to employ his large talent for guile. One
year he got his garden funds from a reluctant Board by an
nouncing that, to show how much the children benefited from
the gardens, he was going to bring six hundred of them to City
Hall for a Board of Estimate meeting. "I knew that would scare
the bejesus out of them," he said. He told a Board secretary that
he had chartered several buses to bring them over. "They'll need
a lot of room, God bless them," he said, "because I want them to
have their little rakes and shovels and hoes to show how much
they love tilting the soil." The prospect of six hundred youngsters
thus armed produced immediate assurance from Mayor John R
Hylan that he would vote for the appropriation.

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT $6

The following year, McGuinness got the appropriation by
nominating Mayor Hylan for President of the United States. He
says that he argued for an hour before the Board and saw that
he was losing. "The sweat run down me back," he recalls. "A13
me nerves was jumping. I could just see them kids when I had to
tell them there would be no gardens. Then it just come to me. It
burst right into me brain. I made it up as I went along." He
said:

Mr. Mayor, in the history of our glorious country, there have been
two great Presidents. One was the Honorable George Washington,
who led the nation to freedom, and the other was the Honorable
Abraham Lincoln, who freed the poor slaves in 1865. Ever since 1865,
a pair of old black shoes have been standing beside the President's
desk in the White House. Those shoes are old and worn, but they
stay there in the White House because they know that the man who
used to walk around in them was loved in the hearts of the poor people
of America. And he loved the poor people too, Mr. Mayor. He was the
man that said that God must have loved the poor people because he
made so many of them. Now when they laid Abraham Lincoln away,
those shoes came walking back to the White House and got themselves
beside his desk, and they've been waiting there ever since for a man
who loves the poor people as much as he did to come and fill them.
Today, Mr. Mayor, the City of New York is going to fill those shoes
with one of its own, John Francis Hylan, who in his splendid wisdom
in voting for these farm gardens is bringing happiness into the hearts
of the little ones of Greenpoint and is showing his people, and the
: great Democratic Party which has always fought for the poor people
that he loves them too. John Francis Hylan will be the next President
of the United States.

Hylan cast his three votes for the appropriations. The next
jnorning's papers ran stories headlined "Hylan for President
Move Started by Local Democratic Leader/' When reporters
called on McGuinness, he ducked most of their questions.
"Hylan's a splendid man," he said, "one of the highest-type men
in the country today." When he was finally pinned down, how
ever, he said, "What the hell, pals, I don't mind giving out a
.few nominations if it will help Greenpoint/'

57 The Big Hello

After he was elected alderman, McGuinness let four years pass
before he challenged McQuade for the district leadership. In
1924, he took the leadership away from McQuade in a primary
and told McQuade he had better close up the Jefferson Club
and join the McGuinness Club. McQuade declined. Backed by
McCooey and the county machine, McQuade tried to regain
the leadership in 1926 and 1928. He lost his county backing in
1928 but tried again in 1930 and 1932. The war was bitter and
hard fought. The two clubs were across the street from one an
other, and night after autumn night the rival leaders would ad
dress their followers from their clubhouse steps. The crowds
spilled into the middle of the street, and there were frequent
border incidents. "Bejesus, I don't like to think how many
busted noses there must have been," McGuinness says. "And
shiners there must have been ten thousand/' And sometimes
McGuinness had so many Greenpointers parading that there
were none left to watch and be impressed. McGuinness parades
were generally held to celebrate a triumph in wheedling im
provements from the city. "Almost every time we'd get a new
lamppost, we'd have ourselves a parade," he recalls. Since the
improvements were for the benefit of the entire community,
everybody marched, even McQuade and the handful of Re
publicans in Greenpoint. McGuinness's club members were
always first in the line of march just behind Professor Con
nolly's band. Sometimes they rode horseback. McGuinness used
to borrow dray horses from the John C. Orr lumberyard. "The
parades was at night," he says, "and the horses wasn't working
then, so we thought it would be nice to have them in the
parades." McGuinness often led the parades mounted on a white
truck horse and wearing a ten-gallon hat. The greatest parade of
all was held to celebrate the opening of the swimming pool, and
the list of participating organizations as reported in the Weekly
Star tells a good deal about McGuinness and Greenpoint:

Rodeo of St. Cecilia's RC Church Greenpoint Patriotic League

Black Post 1818, Veterans of The Boys from Bourkes

Foreign Wars Merry Pals Social Club

Happy Boys Social Club Du Tel Pleasure Club

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT

International Longshoremen's

Association
Italian-American Democratic

Club

Soldiers and Sailors Kin
The Boys from Lindsay's
RKO Greenpoint Theatre
Chums' Pleasure Club
Melody Boys Social Club
Greenpoint YMCA
St. Catherine of Siena's Boys

Band

Polish Legion
Greenpoint Property Owner's

Association
Alpha Republican Club

58

Slovak Citizen's Club

Lexington Council, Knights of
Columbus

Diamond Athletic League

Greenpoint Chamber of Com
merce

The Aggressive Democrats

Bugs Athletic Club

Knights of St. Anthony

Greenpoint Merchants' Associa
tion

Loew's Meserole Theatre

Businessmen of Greenpoint

Hospital Visitation Post 241

Greenpoint YWCA

The King Bees of Greenpoint

Along with the parades, McGuinness arranged a good many
clambakes and kiddies' outings as well as such annual events
as Ye Olde McGuinnesse Farme Barne Dance Nighte (Professor
William F. Connolly's Hayseede Orchestree! Prizes for Most
Realistic Rube! Most Fetchinge Farmerette! Youngest Bald-
headed Man!). Most of these parties were designed mainly to
promote good will in the district, but they were also "rackets"
(the word once had a reasonably innocent connotation mean
ing nothing more than a fund-raising party run by politicians)
to pay off campaign expenses. Part of the money went for some
of the most cryptic propaganda in political history. McGuinness
believes less in the placards which most candidates put up in
store windows and on fences than in throwaways the size of call
ing cards. "With them, they got something they can carry around
and think about/' he says. He still has some of the cards used
during the long war with McQuade. One of them says:

VOTE FOR MCGUINNESS

MCQUADE CANNOT BE TRUSTED

QUINN (FLOPPER) HAS NO PRINCIPLES

ELIMINATE THE SOREHEADS

VOTE FOR MCGUINNESS

5P The Big Hello

And another:

DON'T MIND THE DARN FOOLS
THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S

ALL ABOUT

EVEN THOUGH THEY WOULD BE

NOMINATED THEY WOULDN'T

KNOW WHAT IT IS TO

BE A LEGISLATOR
NOMINATE EXPERIENCED MEN
VOTE MG GUINNESS AND DOYLE

And still another:

GREENPOINT'S DICTIONARY

Wigwam Club; noun; a combination of political derelicts, cast on the
island of Wigwam, with a sole purpose of doing nothing, only dis
rupting the democracy of Greenpoint.

Object of these Derelicts: Horn-blowing, wandering from one organiza
tion to another (no end) doing nothing for the welfare of the public,
and trying to get a job without taking a Civil Service Examination
(probably not qualified for the position they seek.)

VOTE FOR ALDERMAN

Peter J. McGuinness

McQuade's surrender was a long time coining. On two or three
occasions he said he was ready to quit, then changed his mind.
Late in 1927, McGuinness somehow got Mm to sign an actual
document of surrender, which he still has on file at the Club.
It read:

Between now and Jan. 1/28, I will become a member of
the Regular Organization.

J. A. MCQUADE (signed)

O.K. JOHN H. MC COOEY THOMAS F. WOGAN (signed, witness)
(signed, witness)

But he did not become a member until 1932. When he did so, it
was a magnificent occasion, as solemn and formal as the Japa
nese surrender to General MacArthur in Tokyo Bay. It came

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 60

one May evening in 1932. McQuade and an even hundred of
his followers met at the Jefferson Club and locked the front door
for the last time. Then, with McQuade at their head, they
marched slowly, as if to a dirge, down the middle of Manhattan
Avenue and down Norman Avenue to the new headquarters of
the McGuinness Club. McGuinness awaited them at the head
of the flight of steps leading to the door. He was flanked by
John McCooey, now a McGuinness enthusiast, and by James
Burns, the Borough President of Brooklyn. McQuade walked up
the steps, and McGuinness stepped two paces forward and took
his hand. He then wheeled about and led the vanquished cap
tain inside, where McGuinness, McCooey, and Burns watched
McQuade and the hundred followers sign the McGuinness Club
roster and give the treasurer their first year's dues. When this was
done, McGuinness and McQuade went back to the clubhouse
steps, before which a large crowd had gathered. Each made a brief
address. "Peter J. McGuinness/' McQuade said, "is now the un
disputed leader of this district. Let no man say I am not earnest
in my admiration of him. These ugly rumors must stop." Mc
Guinness said: "From this day forward, Pete McGuinness and
Jim McQuade march forward hand in hand like brothers for the
benefit of the grand old Democratic Party/'

In one of his speeches before the capitulation, McGuinness had
said of McQuade, "He is the most despicable man in public life
today. He is a man who is not even a man among men/' When
McQuade died in 1935, McGuinness delivered a eulogy. "You
could always say of old Jim McQuade/' he said, "that he was a
man among men."

Most of the time that McQuade was district leader, he was on
the public payroll either as sheriff or as register, and when
McGuinness became leader he became eligible to succeed to those
now defunct offices if he chose to do so, which he did. Some of
his friends and admirers felt that he made a large mistake in
deserting the Board of Aldermen for the obscurity of a county
office. A writer in the Brooklyn Eagle compared his departure
from City Hall with the "Caesars departing Rome for Constanti
nople or the Pope's retirement to Avignon." McGuinness in time
felt the same way about it, but he thoroughly enjoys his present

6z The Big Hello

job as assistant commissioner of Borough Works, which he can
have as long as there is a Democratic administration in Brook
lyn. But he has one further ambition. He would like to be
borough president. He never wanted a job that would take him
out of New York or force him to relinquish his leadership in
Greenpoint, but he feels that the borough presidency would be
a fitting climax to what he regards as being, up to now, a thor
oughly satisfying career. He has had his managers do some
exploratory work now and then, and only last year a flyer was
circulated around Borough Hall whose origins, according to
McGuinness, were thoroughly baffling. It was somebody's trial
balloon, and it read:

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Borough.

Borough who?

Borough President Peter J. McGuinness

McGuinness for Borough President.

He has only once publicly avowed any interest in the job. As a
rule, he has been indirect in answering reporters' questions. "I
don't think I ought to be saying anything meself," he said last
year, "but I will say for me sweetheart that it would make her
proud as a bird of paradise/' It was in 1937 that he made his
one unequivocal statement. "The demands," he said to the press,
reading slowly from a prepared statement, "have been so many
and so general that after considerable thought and for the best
interests of Greenpoint, I have decided to throw my hat in the
ring and declare tonight that I am willing to accept this nomi
nation should the County Leader see fit to honor me."

The County Leader did not see fit. McGuinness's day is past.
Brooklyn's middle class may be relatively small, but it is a com
munity of middle-class ideals. Its politicians nowadays must
have a bit more finish than McGuinness has and a good many
more pretensions. A man who calls himself a "boss," as Mc
Guinness freely and happily does, just won't do. It would offend,
as perhaps it should, everyone from the Bar Association to what
McGuinness calls the Reverend Clergy. There is no evidence that

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 62

the present Borough President, John Cashmore, is a man of
greater talent or training or capacity than McGuinness, but he
looks like a successful funeral director, while McGuinness looks
like McGuinness, the dock-walloping son of a brass polisher. On
one score, however, McGuinness could pass the purity tests of
the reformers who influence the choice of candidates even when
they do not control them. So far as is known, he is, by all the
standard measures, honest. "They'll never show anyone/' he has
said time after time, "where Peter McGuinness ever stole a
single vote or took a nickel for getting a pal a job." He has been
investigated twice, once by Samuel Seabury for the Hofstadter
Committee, and once by Paul Blanshard, the former Com
missioner of Accounts. Both times his affairs were found to be in
order. In 1927, his clubhouse was raided because it was found to
be quartering bookmakers. McGuinness makes no bones about
this matter. It was during the war with McQuade. Some book
makers approached him and told him that many good precinct
workers, McGuinness followers at heart, were being kept in
bondage to McQuade merely by their love of horseflesh. The
McQuade Club had facilities for betting; the McGuinness Club
did not. If McGuinness would provide them with space for
operations, they said, his club's membership would be increased.
He provided space. Membership did increase. The police held
him briefly after the raid but released him when the play-and-
pay-off sheets showed that only the reasonable profit of twelve
per cent was being made by the bookies and that there was no
evidence that McGuinness or any other official of the club had
taken any gambling money.

At the Seabury investigation, McGuinness was the most in
gratiating of witnesses. Many of the district leaders called upon
to testify were sulky on the stand; many refused to sign waivers
of immunity. McGuinness, who came accompanied by a claque
of dozens of Greenpointers, was in his usual high spirits. He
strode briskly to the witness stand, where he signed the waiver
with a flourish. "Gentlemen," he said to the attending members
of the Hofstadter Committee, "I am glad to present me presence
here today. How do you do? Shoot." Judge Seabury kept Mc
Guinness oa the stand for hours, chiefly, he later said, because

6$ The Big Hello

he liked to hear the man talk. He questioned McGuinness about
his rise in Greenpoint and his fight with McQuade, who, Sea-
bury had just revealed, had banked several hundred thousand
dollars more than he had earned. "And then you took the district
away from McQuade?" Seabury asked at one point. "Judge, I
didn't take nothing away," McGuinness said. "The people of
Greenpoint took it away and give it to me." Seabury asked Mc
Guinness if he had any bank deposits other than the modest
ones the committee knew about or if he had any ill-gotten gains
in one of the "little tin boxes" described by Sheriff Tom Farley,
a large-scale grafter. McGuinness pulled out of a coat pocket a
wallet, outsized and overstuffed, which he has always used as
a filing case for his "contracts." "Judge," he said, "this is the
only tin box I got. It's never contained anything but the heart
aches of me people, me Jewish mazuza, and me father-in-law's
front collar button. He was a great old champeen, Judge." Sea-
bury brought up the gambling incident and asked McGuinness
if he accepted full responsibility for it. "Your honor," McGuin
ness said, "there's only one leader of that club. Right here be
fore you. Shoot, Judge." In time, though, McGuinness grew
bored with the subject. "Judge," he said, "what do you say we
bury this. I told you everything. Don't let's be talking about it
any more. It's dead, and I'm tired of looking at it." Seabury
agreed that the subject had been exhausted. After a few pleasan
tries he ended the examination. As he left the stand, McGuin
ness again addressed the full committee. "Gentlemen," he said,
"it's been a pleasure, I assure you, having this great pleasure of
coming before you. I want to thank you for being so kind and
courteous to me. Good afternoon."

At times, McGuinness adopts a great air of virtue about his
code of ethics. "How the hell do you think I'd feel," he says, "if
I was to stand on the corner some Saturday night and see some
pal coming down the street and I couldn't look him in the eye
without thinking, Well, I got five hundred for getting that one the
job he has today. Why, I'd just feel awful inside to think I had
a nickel that should be going to feed another man's little ones."
More often, however, he puts it on a more pragmatic basis. "It
don't pay," he says. "There's no percentage in it. Let's say I

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 64

tell a precinct captain to use repeaters. He gets away with it in
a city election, then a state election. Then he tries it in a federal
election, and bejesus it's a federal case. He says I put him up
to it and I'm before a federal judge that I don't even know."
He also points out that he is not exposed to the temptations that
beset other politicians. He says he has never seen a horse race. His
only bets have been on penny-a-point rummy. He and his wife
live quietly in a four-room apartment which seems to be fur
nished largely with blue-tinted mirrors, golden-oak chairs and
tables, and fringed lamp shades. The principal objet d'art is a
reproduction of the "Last Supper" in butterfly wings. Mrs.
McGuinness does all the cooking and housework. McGuinness
takes little time off. He tries to get away from the club one
evening a week and take Mrs. McGuinness to a movie. "The
wife picks the shows," he says. McGuinness says he has seen very
little he has really enjoyed since Marie Dressier died. Among
the exceptions are Mae West movies. Mae West, he says, is a
Greenpoint girl. McGuinness knew her father, a local club
fighter. Mrs. McGuinness says she is not among Mae West's
greatest admirers, but she goes anyway to honor local talent. "I
guess she does that wiggling just to be comical," she said in one
of her rare interviews with the press not long ago. "It's the way
Peter says there's worse things than that." On the same occa
sion, McGuinness spoke of his own ways. "Right now," he ex
plained, "I don't drink, smoke, chew, nor gamble. And I never
go to any of them Jesse James night clubs. A fellow said to me
the other day, 'If you don't do none of them things, Peter Mc
Guinness, what the hell do you do?' I said, 'All I do is take God's
beautiful air and sunshine and, bejesus, I play politics.' "

En Route with Truman and Dewey

In the autumn of 1948, I spent a few weeks riding around the
country on the Presidential campaign trains. I rode west from
Washington on the President's train, taking a week or more to
reach Los Angeles via the Pennsylvania., the Rock Island, the
Denver fa Rio Grande Western, the Union Pacific, the Southern
Pacific, and perhaps a couple of others. (There was a good deal
of backtracking and sidetracking.) In Los Angeles, I joined Gover
nor Dewey's train and meandered up the West Coast to Seattle
and east across the northern tier by Northern Pacific, Great
Northern, and the Milwaukee Line. I did not realize at the
time that I was covering the last tours of the country that any
President or Presidential candidate would make by rail. I did
foresee and note, at the end of my letter to the New Yorker
from the Dewey train that television would alter the nature of
subsequent campaigns, but it evidently did not occur to me that
by 1952 the airlines would take over.

Had I realized this, I would,, I imagine, have written at some
what greater length about life aboard the trains. But I did write
a bit about it, and more, I believe, than any other passenger
wrote. I have reprinted the two pieces without change. I would
be pleased not to have written on the assumption that Thomas
E. Dewey was bound to win. But I took it for granted, and so
did everyone else including, I have always been convinced,
President Truman himself at that period of the campaign. I
still have notes on an interview I had with one of the President's
closest friends the day after we left Washington. I find this
entry: "7\ says Truman knows perfectly well he can't win, is

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 66

doing this for the record. Besides, wants to raise hell with 8oth
Congress."

THE TRUMAN TRAIN

POLITICS is a branch of show business, and life aboard a Presi
dential campaign train a peculiar and somewhat wearing form
of existence that I have been sampling on and off during the
past couple of weeks is like life in a fast-moving road carnival.
We are always either setting up the show or knocking it down.
We play more towns than the World of Mirth or Brunk's
Comedians (a carnival overtaken by the Truman train when I
was riding on it through Colorado and Utah), and we work
longer hours. The average self-respecting carnival stays for a week
if a town is good-sized, and for a night in other places, but we
seldom stay anywhere more than a few hours, and we fre
quently play ten-minute stands. Occasionally, we have been in
and out of a town within five or six minutes, and have stood
still for only two. On some days, we have played fourteen or
fifteen places, starting at dawn and keeping at it until just before
midnight. Our main concerns as we go along are narrowly pro
fessional. We worry about the tenting facilities in the town
down yonder, the availability of baths, the friendliness of the
law-enforcement organizations, the liquor regulations in the
next state, and the size and humor of the crowds. The name of a
town we have been in doesn't stand for a plot of earth and a
group of buildings; it stands for a particular audience or a par
ticular incident. To a man who has been riding the rails with
President Truman, Reno isn't a famous divorce-and-gambling
city but the place where our man blew a few of his lines and
talked about "Republican mothbags" when he meant to say
"Republican mossbacks."

Ours is, to be sure, a carnival of an unusual sort. It has just
one act, and the one act is built around just one performer.
For an enterprise of its size, it carries entirely too many hangers-
on twenty-odd in the President's party and fifty-odd in the
press party. Still, the road-show analogy, at least on the Truman
train (which, I understand, runs on a tighter schedule than the
Dewey train), holds pretty true all the way down the line. We

&7 ^n Route with Truman and Dewey

have our beaters, who travel ahead of us and make arrangements
with newspapermen, police, sign painters, and soft-drink con
cessionaires. We have our shills, who get out in the audience and,
by clapping wherever the script calls for it, help to build a
good tip, as old carny hands call a large and eager crowd. Some
of our beaters and shills are men of distinguished reputation.
The chief advance man is Oscar Chapman, Under-Secretary of
the Interior, and the boss shill appears to be Brigadier General
Wallace Graham, the famous grain speculator and personal
physician to the President. He is sometimes assisted by Clark
Clifford, Truman's executive assistant and the chief of the
ghost-writing department. Then, too, we have our Princess
Bright Cloud Miss Margaret Truman, who, wherever her
father's friends have been able to stir up an audience, steps out
from behind a blue velvet curtain onto the rear platform of
the train to wave and smile at the crowd. This is, theatrically,
the high point of the act. True, it is not followed by a spiel
urging the people to lay down the tenth part of a dollar to step
inside the tent and see the rest of the show. Nor is anyone ad
vised to buy a bottle of Dr. Truman's Old Missouri Tonic. But
there is a request to step inside the polling booths on November
2 and pull the right levers or "x" the circle next to the donkey.
"I don't want you to vote for me," the President of the United
States has been saying at county seats and railroad division points
all across the country. "I want you to get out on Election Day
and vote for yourselves. Vote for your own interests, your own
part of the country, your own friends." It seems a rather parochial
point of view to be encouraging in Americans at this stage of
world history, but it is obvious that the President wants very
much to stay on in the White House, and he probably feels that
educating the masses toward broader perspectives can wait until
he gets Governor Dewey off his neck.

It would be going too far to say that the crowds, either in the
small towns or in the large cities, respond enthusiastically to his
appeals for support. They don't. There is every evidence that they
are kindly disposed toward him and that they sympathize with
him about his difficult lot in life, but nothing that I have heard
him say between Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles has drawn

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 68

more than a spot of polite applause. Nobody stomps, shouts, or
whistles for Truman. Everybody claps. I should say that the
decibel count would be about the same as it would be for a
missionary who has just delivered a mildly encouraging report
on the inroads being made against heathenism in Northern Rho
desia. This does not necessarily mean that the people who come
out to hear him intend to vote against him though my personal
feeling is that most of them intend to do exactly that. It may
mean only that he is not the sort of man any more than his
opponent is to provoke wild enthusiasm.

The part of the act that involves the President's daughter is
invariably the most effective part, and Truman's management of
it displays a good deal of canniness and trouping instinct. She
comes on just before the finale at every matinee and evening
performance. The show, as a rule, gets under way after "Hail
to the Chief* has been rendered by the local high-school band.
Next, a local beauty, a local union man, or a local Kiwanis man
hands the President, depending on where we are, a bag of
peaches, a mess of celery, a miner's hat, or just the key to the
city. He has become quite adept at accepting these offerings
graciously and then shoving them the hell inside his car. It
takes, by my unofficial clocking, one and three-quarter minutes
to give the mayor, the governor, and the Democratic candidate
for Congress the two last are likely to ride along with us
through their state their cracks at the audience. Whoever comes
at the end of the procession has, as they say, the unparalleled
honor and glorious privilege of introducing the President. Dur
ing the ten-minute layovers, Truman limits his part of the act to
five minutes. He begins with local scenery, local industry, local
agriculture, and local intelligence; leads from this into a descrip
tion of the contempt in which the Republican party holds the
region he is passing through; goes on to a preview of the Good
Society that he, given another term and the kind of Congress he
wants, will create; and, penultimately, makes his plea for votes.
Then, with a surer sense of timing than he shows in major ad
dresses, he pauses a moment, looks quizzically at the crowd,
smiles, and asks, very humbly, "And now, howja like to meet ma
family?" He cocks his head slightly to catch the response; he

6$ En Route with Truman and Dewey

has the appealing look of a man who wouldn't be surprised if the
answer was no but would be terribly hurt. The crowd's desire to
meet the Truman women, however, never fails to exceed by a
good deal its desire for repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. When he
has caught the favorable response, he says, "First, Mizz Truman,"
and the First Lady, who, like her husband, is more relaxed be
fore small crowds than before large ones or photographers, parts
the curtain and takes her place at his right side. Sometimes,
when the crowd Is very small and friendly, the President identifies
Mrs. Truman as "the boss" and winks knowingly at the men In
the audience. After Mrs. Truman and her admirers have ex
changed greetings, the President says, "And now I'd like to have
you meet my daughter, Margaret." (I thought it a nice touch
that, down in the border states, he said, whether artfully or not
I am unable to decide, "And now I'd like for you to meet Miss
Margaret.") It involves no disrespect for Mrs. Truman to say
that her daughter gets a bigger hand then she does; this country
may be run by and for mothers, but its goddesses are daughters.
Margaret's entrance comes closer than anything else to bringing
down the house.

As soon as the Truman womenfolk have flanked the President,
a railroad official, generally a vice-president of the line, who sits
at a telephone in the car ahead of the President's, calls the
locomotive engineer fifteen cars, or a quarter of a mile, down
the track and tells him to get slowly under way. As the train
pulls out from the station, the family waves good-by. Mrs. Tru
man and Margaret then go back into the car to fix their hair
for the next curtain call, leaving the President alone on the
platform until the last switchman in the yards has had his look.
I am certain that, no matter what the fate of the Truman ad
ministration, millions of Americans will, for the rest of their
lives, have framed in their mind's eye a vivid image of the Three
Traveling Trumans highballing off into the black nights of
Colorado or Arizona, blending with the tall pines In the Sierras,
or being slowly enveloped by the dust of the Midwestern plains.
It will be a picture to cherish, and It will stand Harry Truman
in good stead for the rest of his life. Traveling with him, you get
the feeling that the American people who have seen him and

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 70

heard him at his best would be willing to give him just about
anything he wants except the Presidency.

As a rule, the Truman show does better in the small towns than
in the large ones. The President is a feed-mill type of talker,
and he can be excellent indeed with a small audience. Charles
Ross, his press secretary and the sort of man who wouldn't stoop
to inventing a literary background for his employer, tells me
that Truman has worked hard at his Mark Twain, which con
tributes no doubt to the raciness of his conversational style and
accounts for the pleasant way it falls on the ear. In Dexter, Iowa,
he made a long, scolding speech to 75,000 farmers who were on
hand to see the final in a national plowing contest that was being
held on the farm of a woman named Lois Agg. The farmers, a
happy, prosperous crew, some of whom had flown there in their
own planes, were in no mood to be scolded, but they listened
courteously, and applauded every now and then. A couple of
hours later, after the President had inspected the plowing and
some tractor exhibits, and after he had refreshed himself with
some pieces of prize-winning cakes and pies, he returned to the
platform, to talk informally about his early days on a farm. He
carried on for quite a while about the differences between mules
and machines. He was delightful, and the people were delighted.
When he speaks without a script, as he always does unless he is
making a major campaign address, he inflicts considerable dam
age on the English language, but anything he does on his own
is not one-tenth as deplorable as what his ghost writers do for
Mm. One can choose between, on the one hand, "gluttons of
privilege" and "only an appetizer for an economic tapeworm/'
both of which are creations of his belles-lettres division, and,
on the other hand, a Trumanism such as "I'm goin' down to
Berkeley to get me a degree." The language of the academy
seems to jinx him every time. "I'm only a synthetic alumni,"
he said modestly when, in Grinnell, Iowa, he was introduced by
a professor as the most distinguished graduate of the local col
lege. It can be said of Trumanisms, though, that they are genuine,
that they almost always make sense, and that they occasionally,
as in the line about Berkeley, have an engaging lilt.

Truman's detailed knowledge of the small towns is unexpected

*ji En Route with Truman and Dewey

and remarkable. The Impression one gets is that he has acquired,
in his sixty-four years, a spoonful or two of information about
every community west of the Mississippi and about a good many
of those east of it. Of course he is briefed, by people on the other
side of the blue velvet curtain, on current local problems and
local interests before he hits a place in which he is going to speak,
but he is always able to throw in something from his own stock
pile on its remote or recent past. If he hasn't been there before
himself, the chances are that Mrs. Truman or some relative has,
and that if no living Truman has connections in town, a dead
Truman once had. His maternal grandfather, Solomon Young,
drove wagon trains in the West a century ago, and the old gentle
man went through an extraordinary number of towns. Accord
ing to a Pennsylvania Railroad representative on the Truman
train, this campaign trip is just about the most elaborate tour
ever made of this country. I suspect that he is referring only to
railroad trips and has conveniently overlooked, for the sake of
rail propaganda, those wagon-train trips made by Grandfather
Solomon Young.

In the big cities, the show loses a lot of its fun. One civic
auditorium is pretty much like the next one, chicken-and-peas
dinners are the same everywhere, and so are Democratic com-
mitteemen and committeewomen. Even Los Angeles, from which
something out of the way might be expected, put on a drab
show for the President. True, there were thirty-two searchlights,
but they merely showed up the bare spots in the grandstand. This
is a Dewey year in the movie colony, as it probably is almost
everywhere else. By the time the Truman people got around to
renting a place for the President to speak, in, the Dewey crowd
had leased the Hollywood Bowl for the evening he was scheduled
to talk, in order, as they put it, to "rehearse" the lighting effects
for the Governor's appearance the following night. (When one
sees the lighting effects at a Hollywood rally, to say nothing of
the neon signs in Hollywood and Los Angeles, one can easily
understand why federal power projects are so essential to Cali
fornia's welfare.) The Democrats had to be satisfied with a place
called Gihnore Stadium. The unfortunate thing about Gilmore
Stadium was not that it is smaller than the Hollywood Bowl but

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 72

that it is larger. Neither Dewey nor Truman drew capacity crowds
in Hollywood; as a matter of fact, they drew about the same
number of people. But the vacant seats at Truman's meeting were
more numerous, because the number of seats was greater.

Almost the only color in the big-city productions is provided
by the automobiles in which we ride. Like a circus, we start off
with a parade, and though our parades are less animated than
those of most circuses, they are as musical and, thanks to the
cars, have just as much glitter. Before I started on this trip, I
did not realize the odd role played by the automobile in national
politics. The Truman party was driven from Dexter, Iowa, to
Des Moines, approximately forty miles, in a fleet of thirty-five
brand-new cars, all of them convertibles with the top down. I
didn't stop to wonder how so many new convertibles came to be
at the disposal of the Party of the Workingmen, in Iowa, of all
places. Then, riding in Car Number 30, through downtown Des
Moines, I began to think it strange that the crowds that had
seen the President, riding in Car Number i, five minutes earlier,
did not disperse. They were looking just as hard at the carloads
of rumpled and unsmiling reporters as they must have looked
at the celebrities up forward. "Sure they're beautiful/' I over
heard a middle-aged man say to his companion, "but I guess you
have to be a Democrat to get one." "Thing about a Packard,"
another man said, "you can still tell one when you see it the
old pointed radiator and those red hubcaps. Hasn't changed
since I've known it." "Ought to strip all that housing down,"
a third voter remarked. "Ever try to get a jack under one of
those things?"

I didn't have time to inquire into the details of automobile
procurement in Des Moines, but I did in Denver, two days later.
The Truman train was met by twenty-two Kaisers and Frazers
and eight new Fords. I asked our driver if he had lent his car
to the President out of party loyalty. "Nah," he said. "This isn't
my car. I'm just helping out a friend of mine here. He's the
Kaiser-Frazer distributor in town Northwestern Auto Company,
they call it and I guess he come out first in this agency fight.
"Got mostly Kaisers and Frazers here. Lucky for him. The 1949
models just come in yesterday, and he's getting a chance right off

73 En Route with Truman and Dewey

to display them." It was the same everywhere. There was a tie-in
with the dealers in every city we visited: free transportation in
exchange for free advertising. The new cars were seen by the
President's admirers, and the President was seen by admirers of
new cars. So far, the struggle has been mainly between Ford
and Kaiser-Frazer. The Ford people seem to me to be leading
by about three to two. Denver was the only place where Kaiser-
Frazer was plainly in the political ascendancy. If the crowds
have been, for the most part, pleased with the new models, the
Secret Service men guarding the President have not. In Los
Angeles, they rebelled. They refused to let him ride through that
unpredictable city in anything without running boards for them
to stand on. A search for something with running boards was
made, and a 1934 Lincoln touring car was found. It belonged to
Cecil B. De Mille, who plans to vote for Dewey but whose
patriotic impulses are stronger than his party loyalty.

As a piece of railroading, the handling of the Truman train
is a work of art. Any Presidential campaign train demands con
siderable ingenuity and planning by the railroad people, but if
the man already in office is a candidate to succeed himself, the
trip is particularly difficult to organize. The problems of security
are greater, and so are those of communication. The President's
train must be a mobile White House as well as a mobile hustings.
I talked about the train with Mr. Dewey Long, a Civil Service
employee who for fifteen years has been the White House trans
portation and communications officer, and to Mr. Harry Karr,
who is division passenger agent for the Pennsylvania Railroad in
Washington, D.C. Both men have been on the Presidential train
from the beginning. A good part of Mr. Long's worries were over
by the time the train began to roll, but Mr. Karr, who has been
on the job of running Presidents around the country ever since
the days of Harding, has to think about each Presidential train
constantly until it pulls back into the Union Station, in Wash
ington. Mr. Karr is a slight, tense man, physically and emotion
ally a sort of Ernest Truex, and he says that his job has left its
mark on him. "I may not look it from the outside," he says, "but
inside I'm a nervous wreck. It's been real high-tension stuff all
along from Harding and Coolidge on down." We were riding,

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 74

as we talked, through the Royal Gorge of Colorado, where the
cut in the Rockies made by the Arkansas River is only thirty
feet wide at some points. "Just look out the window," he said.
"Makes you sweat blood even to think of taking a President
through here. Let a few boulders roll down that thing and
we'd all be shooting the rapids. Believe me, we thought long
and hard before we agreed to bring this train down through
here."

When the President and his political advisers have decided on
a trip, they call in Mr. Long and sketch out for him the route
they wish the train to travel, the places they wish to visit, and
the approximate timetable they wish to keep. The White House
tries to alternate between the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore
& Ohio out of Washington for western trips, so whichever line
is due for its turn gets it. This last time, it was the Pennsylvania,
which is why Mr. Long, after getting his first instructions, called
Mr. Karr in on the job. Mr. Karr put the Pennsylvania's Special
Movement Bureau to work, and the Bureau, in co-operation with
the Rock Island, the Denver & Rio Grande Western, the Union
Pacific, and other lines over whose track the train was to go,
worked out the schedule. "When we're told about a deal of this
kind/' Mr. Karr said, "we flash the code word 'POTUS' to every
line along the way. It stands for 'President of the United States/
and it means that when the time comes, they have to be ready
to do a number of things. Every grade crossing has to be manned
when the train passes, and I just can't tell you how many switches
have to be spiked until we've moved on." To arrange all this
spiking and fit the schedule of a Presidential train into train
schedules all across the country and back is, naturally, a fairly
involved problem, but on this trip it was done almost without
a hitch. According to Mr. Karr, only one regular train has been
seriously delayed by the transcontinental movement of the
President up to now. This was a Rock Island express running
between Kansas City and Denver. The superintendent of one
division of the line wanted to sidetrack the Truman train, which
on this part of the journey was pulling up wherever two or three
were gathered together, at a certain point and let the express
pass it, but it was decided, after a Sunday conference of railroad

75 En Route with Truman and Dewey

officials In Kansas City, not to let the train by. "There was just
the tiniest chance that a piece of flying steel or something like
that might have hit the President's train/' Mr. Karr told me.

"Of course, nothing could have hurt the President, in his
armored car." At that, the express was only forty-five minutes late
getting into Denver.

The train that Mr. Karr had to assemble for the current trip
is a heterogeneous assortment of rolling stock. Not counting the
pilot train usually a locomotive and a single car which runs
five miles ahead to see that no anarchists have torn up the track,
it is seventeen cars long and includes, in addition to Pullmans,
diners, lounges, and a car in which the press can work, a com
munications car, operated and staffed by the Army Signal Corps,
and the Ferdinand Magellan, the President's special car, which
belongs to the government and was used by President Roosevelt
throughout the war. The communications car, which is just be
hind the locomotive, contains two Diesel engines to generate
power for its radio teletype and other electrical equipment. The
radio teletype makes it possible for the President to keep in con
stant touch with Washington and, through Washington, with the
rest of the world. News, most of it in code, is received in the
communications car and phoned back to the President's car.
The communications car can also transmit messages. Telephone
lines are kept open from the White House and the State De
partment to the towns the President's train goes through. He
can pull up at any whistle stop in the country and hold a long
distance Cabinet meeting, provided he can find his Cabinet mem
bers.

The Ferdinand Magellan, which has four staterooms, a galley,
a dining room, and an observation platform, is, of course, the
last car on the train, and brings the over-all length up to the
maximum legal length for most states. In effect, it is not only a
seventeenth car but an eighteenth, for it weighs 265,000 pounds,
or about twice as much as the average Pullman. The extra weight
of the car is accounted for mainly by the armor plate, partly by
the three-inch bulletproof glass in the windows, and partly by
the extra equipment it carries, including a couple of escape
hatches and the blue velvet curtain.

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT j6

THE DEWEY TRAIN

CANDIDATES notoriously promise better than they ever perform,
but i Governor Dewey manages the Presidency half as well as
he is managing his campaign for It, we are about to have four,
eight, twelve, sixteen years of cool, sleek efficiency in govern
ment. I venture upon this prophecy after quite a spell of riding
aboard the Dewey Victory Special, the train that has been hauling
the Republican candidate, his wife, and his entourage of ad
visers, well-wishers, favor-curriers, and newspapermen up and
down the country since mid-September. Before I looked in on
the Dewey campaign, I had acquired some seasoning and a basis
for comparison by serving a correspondent's hitch on the train
that took President Truman and his similar, but far smaller,
group of fellow passengers over much the same route. As far as
the arts and techniques, as distinct from the political content,
of the campaigns are concerned, the difference between the Demo
cratic and Republican operation Is, I calculate, thirty or forty
years. It is the difference between horsehair and foam rubber,
between the coal-stove griddle and the pop-up toaster. Dewey is
the pop-up toaster.

Everything I've seen of the Dewey campaign is slick and
snappy. This is in strong contrast to the general dowdiness and
good-natured slovenliness of the Truman campaign, at least when
and where I observed it. Truman's mass meetings were all old-
style political rallies, brightened up, on occasion, by some droopy
bunting and by Department of Sanitation brass bands. In San
Francisco, the Democrats contracted a most unfortunate alliance
with a musical branch of the local parent-teacher association,
which called itself the Mother Singers of America. The Mother
Singers were authentic mothers and grandmothers who wrap
ped themselves in yards of brown monk's cloth and sang the kind
of songs you would expect them to. The Dewey group favors
professional musicians, professional decorators, and professionals
in everything else. All the way down the line, his effects are
more dramatic and electrifying. At a Truman meeting, the
President, as a rule, takes his seat on the platform and sits
quietly, a slender and almost pathetic figure surrounded by

77 En Route with Truman and Dewey

florid police commissioners and senators of heroic bulk, through
all the preliminaries. When his turn finally comes to speak, his
advance toward the microphone hardly takes the multitude by
storm. Dewey's entrances are delayed. He remains in the wings
until all the invocations and endorsements are over. Sometimes
he stays away from the meeting hall until the last moment. Then,
with a great whining of motorcycle-escort sirens to hush the
crowd and build up suspense, he arrives. The instant his name is
spoken, he comes onstage, seemingly from nowhere, arms out
stretched to embrace the crowd and gather In the applause that
breaks the hush. It is an uncannily effective piece of business.
Dewey doesn't seem to walk; he coasts out like a man who has
been mounted on casters and given a tremendous shove from
behind. However it is done, he rouses the crowd to a peak of
excitement and enthusiasm, and he has to wait an agreeably
long while for the racket to die down.

Dewey likes drama, but he has an obvious distaste for the
horseplay side of politics. He accepts honorary memberships in
sheriffs' posses and fraternal organizations, but he is uncomforta
ble during the installation ceremonies. On his first transcontinen
tal tour after his nomination, he collected some fifteen cow-
puncher hats, but he refused to try on any of them In public.
The only time he got into the spirit of things was at his rally
in the Hollywood Bowl. For this gathering, his local managers,
mainly movie people, arranged a first-class variety show. In addi
tion to assembling a lot of stars who endorsed the candidate in
short, pithy, gag-laden speeches, they hired a marimba band and
a chorus line for the preliminary entertainment. For the invoca
tions, they recruited a minister, a priest, and a rabbi all of whom
could have played romantic leads themselves. At the end of
Dewey's speech, the marimba band struck up "God Bless Amer
ica," as a recessional. Dewey was still standing at the microphone,
and Mrs. Dewey, as she always does after he finishes, came for
ward to join him. Perhaps the pageantry finally overcame him,
for suddenly he breathed deep and took aboard a full load of the
fine night air of Hollywood. Then he gave vent to the rich bari
tone he spent so many years developing. ". . . land that I love/'
he sang, and, slipping an arm around Mrs. Dewey's waist, looked

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT j8

encouragingly at her. Mrs. Dewey came in on the next line, and
together they went all the way through the rest of the Irving
Berlin anthem.

It is one of the paradoxes of 1948 that the man in office is a
much less experienced campaigner than the man who is seeking
to win the office. Truman was on the public payroll when Dewey
was still a college boy in Michigan, but his serious campaigning
has been limited to two tries for the United States Senate and one
for the Vice-Presidency. It wasn't bush-league stuff, but it wasn't
big-league, either. Dewey, on the other hand, is entitled to wear
service stripes for three major campaigns. In 1940, he sought the
Republican nomination as vigorously as he sought the main prize
in 1944 and is seeking it now. The effects are apparent in the
organization and planning of every phase of his campaign travels.
There is far more foresight and far better timing and scheduling
than in the President's tour. Dewey's staff work is superior, too.
For example, correspondents with Truman were forced, while I
was aboard his train, to miss deadline after deadline because they
had to wait too long for advance copies of the President's
speeches. Presumably his ghost writers, some of whom were on
the train and some of whom were back in Washington, were
agonizing up to the zero hour, trying to make their sentences
come out right. And then the sentences didn't come out right any
way. The rhetoric that Truman was given to deliver was coarse,
gritty, old-fashioned political stuff, with about as much flow as
oatmeal. Dewey's speeches, which reporters can put on the
telegraph wires twelve to twenty-four hours before delivery time,
are as smooth and glossy as chromium. It may be that, on
analysis, their clich content would turn out to be neither much
lower nor much higher than that of Truman's speeches, but,
as one man on the challenger's train put it, they are written and
spoken in such a manner that they give one the feeling Dewey
has not borrowed his cliches from the masters but has minted
them all by himself.

A conscientious search for the literary antecedents of Dewey's
speeches might show that the strongest influence is the Reader's
Digest. They are full of the good cheer, the defiant optimism,
the inspirational tone, and the breath-taking simplification that

7 En Route with Truman and Dewey

have made that magazine so popular. If Dewey's speeches are
not consciously modeled on the Digest, there are few of them
that would not seem at home in its pages. "Your future lies ahead
of you," a catchy line that turned up in several of the speeches,
would make a splendid Digest title. Moreover, in sound Digest
fashion, Dewey is promising to start, when he gets to Washing
ton, "the greatest pruning and weeding operation in American
history." When the thought first occurred to me that Dewey or
his advisers might have picked up a few tricks from the Digest,
I asked James G. Hagerty, the candidate's press secretary, if he
had any idea whether or not this was the case. "I hardly think
so," Hagerty said. "The Governor has a style all his own that he's
been working on for years." Even so, it is worth noting that one
of the important personages aboard the Dewey train is Stanley
High, a Roving Editor of the Digest and the author of some of
the most celebrated articles it has published in recent years. The
dope on Mr. High, as I got it from Hagerty, is that he is travel
ing with Dewey not as an author but as a former clergyman. His
function, I was told, is to advise Dewey on the religious implica
tions of political issues and on the political implications of
religious issues. Still, it might be that, unknown to Hagerty, Mr.
High finds time, in between issues, to make a phrase here and
condense a line of argument there.

Dewey's effect on his audience is unquestionably greater than
Truman's. He does not, so far as I am able to judge, draw larger
crowds. The business of estimating the size of crowds is, by the
way, probably one of the most nonsensical and misleading aspects
of political reporting. Some correspondents make a hobby of it,
and conceivably their technique improves with practice, but
most of them rely on police officials for their figures. Suspecting
that a policeman can be as wrong as the next man, I made a sim
ple test at one Dewey meeting. I asked the ranking police official
for his estimate and then asked the manager of the auditorium
for his. The policeman's count, which turned up in a number
of newspapers, was fifty per cent higher. Since the manager's
standard of living is directly related to the size of the audiences
in his auditorium, I imagine it would be safer to string along
with him. Then, there is always an element of fortuitousness in

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT So

the size of the street crowds that watch the candidates ride
through the big cities. There is no way of telling how many
people have come out of their way to see the distinguished visitor
and how many just happen to be around. It is customary for
campaign managers to take advantage of the fortuitous element.
Campaign trains have an oddly predictable way of arriving for
afternoon meetings just before the lunch hour and for evening
meetings just before the stores and offices close. A candidate's
procession never goes directly from the depot to its destination
in town. The Civic Center may be only three or four blocks
up State Street from the Union Station, but the motorcade is
certain to follow a route that covers at least thirty blocks, and
thereby catches a lot more innocent bystanders. Possibly the best
way to calculate the turnout of admirers would be to estimate
the number of onlookers carrying bundles and then subtract
them from the total.

For judging crowds, the ear is probably a more reliable instru
ment than the eye. Its verdict, I would say, favored Dewey almost
everywhere. No Truman crowd that I heard responded with
more than elementary courtesy and occasionally mild and rather
weary approval. Partly, no doubt, this was because the President
has a lamentable way of swallowing the very lines he ought to
bellow or snarl, and partly, I think, it was because he simply
didn't have his audience with him. Dewey's ovations are
never, as the phrase goes, thundering, but his applause is not
mere politeness. Dewey is not an orator in the classic sense, but he
is a first-class elocutionist, and when he fixes his eyes on the
crowd and says that the way to avoid having Communists in the
government is to avoid appointing them in the first place, as he
plans to do, he gets what he wants from the customers, which
means, naturally, that they are getting what they want from him.

The junior-executive briskness in the running of the Dewey
campaign extends, quite mysteriously, to many phases of life
aboard the train. Campaign trains become, in their few weeks
of existence, compact social organizations. They develop their
own mores and their own institutions. One of the most remark
able indeed, almost weird features of life on them is the way
the spirit of the leading passenger, riding in the last car, seems

Si En Route -with Truman and Dewey

to dominate and mold the spirit of the entourage. It is under
standable that this should happen to the staff of the candidate,
but it actually affects even the newspapermen. Candidates have
nothing to do with the selection of the reporters who accompany
them. In some cases, to be sure, the reporters select candidates,
and it is conceivable that psychological affinity may have In
fluenced their choices. But the effect of that affinity would be, at
best, a small one, and it would govern only a few journalists.
Yet I am prepared to testify under oath that the atmosphere even
in the press section of the Truman train is pure Harry Truman,
and the atmosphere in the press section of the Dewey train is
pure Tom Dewey. One is like life in the back rooms at District
Headquarters, the other like life in the Greenwich Country Club.
The favorite beverage in the club cars on the Truman train, when
I was on it, was the Kentucky bourbon highball, before, during,
and after meals. I don't recall seeing a single cocktail served.
Highballs are often seen on the Dewey train, but Martinis and
Manhattans are more In vogue. The principal diversion on the
Truman train was poker, generally seven-card stud. At least
two games were always in progress. If any poker is played on the
Dewey train, it is played behind closed compartment doors.
There are, however, several spirited bridge games going on all
the time.

It may be that the correspondents with Truman took to the
more rugged forms of recreation because their life was more
rugged. Life with Truman was not exactly primitive but, com
pared to life with Dewey, it was hard. If you wanted anything
laundered, you did It yourself, in a Pullman basin. When you
detrained anywhere for an overnight stay, it was every man for
himself. You carried your duffel and scrabbled for your food.
If a man was such a slave to duty that he felt obliged to hear
what the President said in his back-platform addresses, he had to
climb down off the train, run to the rear end, mingle with the
crowd, and listen. Often, this was a hazardous undertaking,
for the President was given to speaking late at night to crowds
precariously assembled on sections of roadbed built up fifteen
or twenty feet above the surrounding land. The natives knew
the contours of the ground, but the reporters did not, and more

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 82

than one of them tumbled down a cindery embankment. The
Dewey organization sees that none of these inconveniences
trouble the life of anyone on the Governor's train. Whenever
the Dewey train stops overnight, luggage vanishes from your
berth and is waiting for you in the hotel room you have been
assigned. Good Republican caterers have hot coffee and thick
roast-beef sandwiches waiting in the press rooms at every stop
over. Laundries are alerted a thousand miles ahead to be ready
to turn out heavy loads in a few hours. There is really no need for
anyone to bestir himself and risk his life to hear the whistle-stop
speeches, since almost the entire train is wired for sound and the
words of the Governor are carried over the public-address system.

Truman and Dewey are contrasting types, but in many
fundamental ways they act on roughly the same principles and
proceed toward roughly the same ends. Office-seeking is a great
leveler. Most men who engage in it are sooner or later forced to
abandon themselves to the ancient practices of audience-flatter
ing, enemy-vilifying, name-remembering, moon-promising, and
the like. In these matters, the 1948 candidates are just about neck
and neck. Offhand, I would say that Truman is working a little
harder at enemy-vilifying and name-remembering, while Dewey
looks a little stronger in audience-flattering and also has a slight
edge in the scope and beauty of his promises. This last is a
natural consequence of the relative positions of the two men.
Truman, being in office, can hardly claim the ability to deliver
in a second term what he has manifestly been unable to deliver
in his first. There is no one, however, to gainsay Dewey when
he asserts that under his leadership "every American will walk
forward side by side with every other American." Some drill-
masters might quibble over the difficulty of achieving such a
formation, but no one pays any attention to logic in this season
of the quadrennium.

It is probably a good thing for the sanity of the republic that
we do have this suspension of logic during campaigns, for the fact
is that reason is outraged not only by the speeches of the candi
dates but by the very idea of this traveling up and down the
country to make them. I have been unable to find, on the Dewey

8$ En Route with Truman and Dewey

train, the Truman train, or anywhere else, a single impartial and
responsible observer of national affairs who is willing to defend
the thesis that this tearing around will affect the electoral vote in
even one state. There are, no doubt, some people in every com
munity who will vote for the man who says the pleasantest things
about the local crop and the local rainfall, but their number is
probably balanced by the number of intelligent citizens who will
decide, the next morning, to vote against the man who disturbed
their children's rest by roaring through the night, surrounded by
a hundred motorcycle cops with a hundred sirens, so that he could
deliver an address pointing out that the Republicans invented
the Depression or that the Democrats invented Communism.
Nobody knows exactly why or when people switch political al
legiances, but it is known that an insignificant number of them
do during a campaign. Jim Farley said, in the early Roosevelt
days, that every vote in the country was frozen by October i, and
the work done by Mr. Roper and Dr. Gallup indicates that the
results are settled long before that.

In theory, the institution of the traveling campaign is edu
cational as well as political. It gives the voters a chance to hear
the candidates and learn their views first-hand. No doubt the
theory had great merit a century ago, but today it is possible
for any citizen to hear the candidates' voices and to learn their
views in his own home, where the acoustics are a good deal better
than in a stadium or auditorium. If an appraisal of views is the
important goal, the conscientious citizen must attend to that
matter between campaigns, not during them, for what he gets
around election time is not a candidate's idea of things but his
own, as nearly as the candidate is able to figure it out and re
produce it. One could also argue that it is a healthy thing in a
democracy for the people to see their Presidents and Presidents-
to-be, to give them the once-over and observe what psychologists
call their "expressive movements." This notion has some measure
of plausibility, but it will be harder to find it four years from
now, when, they tell us, television will be installed in every
American home that today has radio. There will be no reason
then for not chopping the observation platform from some obso-

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 84

lete Pullman, setting it up in a television studio, and hiring a
few extras to lug aboard the baskets of apples, the Stetsons, and
the bouquets.

One feature of the old ritual, however, will be beyond the
grasp of science for quite a while yet. That is handshaking.
"Hell's bells!" a political adviser on one of the trains said to me.
"Everybody knows that we don't go through all this business to
win friends or influence people. We go through it to keep the
friends we've already got. The only important thing that happens
on this train is the handshaking and hello-there-jacking that go
on back in the caboose. We've got a party organization to keep
going, and the best way to keep it going is to have the big men
in the party get out and say nice things to the little men. I don't
care which party it is. It means everything to the strangers you
see in the club cars to go back home and tell how they rode
down to the state line with the big wheel and how, when they
went into his private car, he remembered them well from his last
swing around the country. If you think party organizations are
not a good and necessary thing in a democracy, then you can
write all this off as a lot of nonsense. If you think they're im
portant, then you can't deny the usefulness of these trips/* Stated
in those terms, the question is a weighty one.

Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

On April 4, 1952, 1 rode from Washington to New York on the
Morning Congressional with a friend, Newbold Morris* and had
him tell me, in as much detail as he could recall, the story of
his two months' sojourn in the capital. He had gone there at the
request of the Democratic administration to try to clean up what
General Eisenhower and the Republicans were, in the Presi
dential campaign that was shortly to follow, to call "the mess in
Washington.'" Messes follow one another so rapidly in Washing
ton and resemble one another so closely that the latest one tends
to drive the earlier ones from our memories. Of the "mess'' of
which General Eisenhower spoke so often, it can be said, first of
all, that it existed, and, second, that it was probably more wide
spread in the sense of involving greater numbers of people
than anything in the Eisenhower administration. On the other
hand, no figure of the eminence of Sherman Adams, whose
troubles are briefly discussed elsewhere in this book, was impli
cated, and there were no scandals of the magnitude of that in
volving the Dixon-Yates contract. But there were on the federal
payroll in 1952 a large number of people whose notions of
public service were deficient and there was quite a bit of graft
"mink coats" and "deep-freezers" being the symbolic payoffs of
that particular set of scandals.

At the bottom of this affair, it always seemed to me, was the
fact that Harry Truman, a man whose surprising gifts and
gallantry may have offset but did not overcome his limitations,
decided that he would insist upon the highest standards of pub-

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 86

lie service in those parts of the government responsible -for
policy and strategy in foreign affairs but would not himself
attempt to police those agencies that dealt with domestic affairs.
This may simply have been an unconscious recognition of his
inability to deal with everything at once, as well as of his
politician's desire to help and protect his political friends. At any
rate, a good many men who should have been elsewhere got into
the Department of Justice, the outer offices of the White House,
the Internal Revenue Service, and quite a few other places. In
time, their misuses of office were exposed by Congressional com
mittees, by journalistic critics, and by Republicans eager to build
a case against Harry Truman.

In the early weeks of 1952, evidently, Truman told J. Howard
McGrath, a former Senator from Rhode Island and chairman of
the Democratic National Committee who was then presiding over
the Department of Justice, that something ought to be done.
Part of what followed Newbold Morris told me on the train to
New York, and I wrote it as fast as I could for the New Yorker.
/ republish it here practically unchanged. I have added only a
few identifications and a detail or two that did not get into
the first hasty report. It seems to me a revealing and I hope
amusing bit of recent history.

NEWBOLD MORRIS, the irregular Republican who served for two
months as Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United
States and was relieved on April 3 by the then Attorney General,
J. Howard McGrath, who himself resigned a few hours after
firing Morris, first heard of the job on Monday, January 28.
Morris was at his office, in the firm of Lovejoy, Morris, Wasson &
Huppuch, at 52 Wall Street, getting ready to go home on the
subway after a day he describes as having been spent, like most
of his days, "punctuating wills and contracts" when he received
a telephone call from Peyton Ford, who had formerly been an
assistant of McGrath's. Ford was the only member, past or
present, of McGrath's department with whom Morris had even
a slight acquaintance. One of Morris's law partners had come to
know Ford in London during the war and had later introduced
him to Morris. As a friend and emissary of McGrath's, Ford had

Sj Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

called Morris from Washington on several occasions before
January 28, but never about Morris himself. Some time earlier,
he had wanted Morris to join in an effort to persuade Morris's
father-in-law, Judge Learned Hand, to become chairman of what
was briefly known as the Nimitz Commission, which was to draw
up a new internal-security code. Another time, he had wanted
Morris's help in persuading another of Judge Hand's sons-in-
law, Norris Darrell, a partner in the firm of Sullivan 8c Crom
well, to accept the position of Chief of the Tax Division in the
Justice Department, a post recently vacated by T. Lamar Caudle,
whose probity seemed open to serious question. Each of these
requests had entailed several conversations.

On January 28, Ford said he was calling at the request of the
Attorney General, who wished to know if Morris himself would
be interested in a job advising the government, on a temporary
and part-time basis, in the matter of "systems and procedures"
for maintaining the integrity of federal employees. Morris, who
is a born reformer and who, like many reformers and nonre-
formers throughout the country, had been reading with con
siderable alarm various reports that the integrity of some federal
employees was not everything it might be, was very much in
terested. It astonished him that the Department of Justice should
want his services on any basis, and at first he suspected that Ford
was really after his father-in-law or his brother-in-law, but when
Ford assured him that the Attorney General wished to discuss
the job with Morris himself, Morris was flattered and pleased. He
had considered his political career in the course of which he
served in the Corporation Counsel's office, was a member of the
old Board of Aldermen, was president of the City Council
during Fiorello H. La Guardia's mayoralty, and staged two
unsuccessful campaigns for mayor as over and done with. As a
reformer, he took a good deal of pride in his defeats, but they
seemed to him to have been so overwhelming as to preclude the
possibility of his being called back into public life. "I thought I
was in mothballs," he says. Since leaving the office of Council
President in 1945, Morris had spent most of his time in private
practice, working on wills, trusts, estates, property transfers, and
corporation matters. It was agreeable and lucrative work, but

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 88

Morris, who went into politics in 1932 largely to relieve bore
dom, missed the stimulation of public life. His nostalgia was
sometimes so great that, during the O'Dwyer administration, he
would walk from Wall Street up to City Hall and wander
through the building. "If Impy [Mayor Vincente Impellitteri
was then president of the Council] was out somewhere," Morris
recalls, "I'd go into his office the most beautiful office I ever
worked in and check up on what kind of care he was taking of
John Adams' mahogany chairs."

From reading the newspapers, Morris knew, of course, that
the job Ford had mentioned to him or at least one similar to
it had been offered to a number of other people, among them
Judge Thomas Murphy, the prosecutor of Alger Hiss, and the
late Robert Patterson, former Secretary of War, and had found
no takers. But he felt fairly sure that if honorable terms could be
agreed upon, he would accept it. He thought he would enjoy the
work, and he also thought it was his duty to respond to a call
of this sort whether he expected to enjoy the job or not. He com
municated some of these sentiments to Ford and arranged to go
to Washington on Wednesday, January 30, to meet the Attorney
General and have a talk with him. Tuesday night he got on a
sleeper at Pennsylvania Station, and Wednesday morning he
alighted in Washington. At eleven o'clock that morning, he met
McGrath for the first time. The meeting took place in McGrath's
home, on the outskirts of Washington, with Ford and the
Solicitor General of the United States, Philip B. Perlman, also
present. McGrath did most of the talking, and Morris got along
rather well with him during the two hours the conference lasted.

In a statement Morris issued on April 3, right after being
fired by McGrath, he said that he was not disillusioned by what
the Attorney General had done, "for I never had any illusions
'about Howard McGrath." What he meant by this, he says, is
that he is inclined to expect very little of organization politicians
in general. But on January 30, despite the poor view he takes
of all the McGraths of this world, Morris had no particular
fault to find with J. Howard McGrath, the Attorney General.
"I explained to him that I had broken a lot of crockery in New
York politics and didn't stand much better with my own party

Sg Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

than I did with his/* Morris says. "I told him that if I took
the job on, I'd want my own staff and a completely free hand."
McGrath said that he knew all about Morris and that Morris
was exactly the kind of man the government wanted. McGrath
also said that President Truman had been fully briefed on
Morris's qualifications and disqualifications, and had agreed that
he was the right man. By then, it had been explained to Morris
that it was an investigator, and not merely an adviser on systems
and procedures, that the administration was after, and this
prospect, although Morris had never been an investigator of any
sort before, was quite agreeable to him, provided he was
guaranteed the independence he wanted. In the light of sub
sequent events, It is clear that there was a misunderstanding
between Morris and McGrath about the meaning of "inde
pendence"; at that meeting, however, the Attorney General was,
as Morris remembers it, entirely in accord with everything
Morris said. He told Morris that he wanted a full investigation
of the federal government, but he explained that in his view the
task would not be a difficult one. "He told me that I shouldn't
let the job disrupt my private and professional life too much,"
Morris recalls. "He said he didn't want me to work myself to
death, and assured me that it ought to be possible to clean the
whole thing up In a matter of months with two or three days*
work each week." In enumerating for McGrath some of the
things that he felt might disqualify him for the assignment,
Morris did not bring up his part in the now celebrated Casey
oil-tanker deal. He says it never occurred to him, though he ad
mits that perhaps it should have. Nor did McGrath mention
it, despite the fact that the Department of Justice had been
looking into the deal for some time. It Is difficult to see how the
kind of report that McGrath said his assistants had given him on
Morris could have failed to mention it.

After the Wednesday session with McGrath, Perlman, and
Ford, Morris came back to New York. He had arranged to re
turn to Washington on Friday, February i, for another con
ference with the Attorney General and for a meeting with the
President. Technically, he had not yet accepted the job, but he

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 9 o

had given every Indication that he would. When he got home,
he immediately began making the necessary adjustments in his
personal and business life. One of the first things he did was
sever, formally and completely, all his connections with Love-
joy, Morris, Wasson & Huppuch for the duration of his govern
ment work. It is customary for a lawyer entering government
service on a temporary assignment to make an agreement with
his firm whereby he receives no part of the firm's income that
derives from business connected in any way with the government.
Morris drew up an agreement whereby he was to receive no part
of the firm's income that derived from any source whatever as
long as he was on the federal payroll. If his stay in Washington
had not been so brief, this would have meant quite a loss, for
his pay as McGrath's Special Assistant was $15,000 a year, which
is less by far than his average income from his firm, and it cost
him, as a man with a deplorable compulsion to pick up the
checks of his colleagues and of newspaper reporters, just about
all he was getting in Washington merely to live there. Having
wound up his affairs in New York, he went back to Washington
on Friday, four days after the first call from Ford. During the
forenoon, Morris and the Attorney General had a fifteen-minute
session with the President at the White House. Morris had met
Truman only once before. That was in the fall of 1944, when
Truman, who was then campaigning for the Vice-Presidency, had
visited New York and had received a celebrated and, it was
thought at the time, calculated rebuff from La Guardia, who
chose to keep the candidate waiting in his office for half an hour
while he carried on a trivial telephone conversation with one of
his associates. Morris had wandered into La Guardia's office and
had been shocked to find Truman standing by a window, staring
out toward the intersection of Broadway and Chambers Street.
He introduced himself and filled in the remaining minutes of
La Guardia's phone talk by imparting to Truman some of his
own esoteric information about the architecture of City Hall
and the structure's close resemblance to an eighteenth-century
hotel de ville.

If the President recalled this encounter when he met Morris
on February i, he did not say so. Even so, Morris found the

c?j Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

talk with the President, which was the briefest and most per
functory of a total of three White House or Blair House con
ferences he had while he was on the job, altogether satisfactory.
He says that he asked the President If the Attorney General had
explained what an unreliable character he was generally thought
to be and what a bitter-end reformer his record showed him to
be. "I told him he ought to know that I was an opponent of the
entire spoils system, even when It didn't result In corruption/'
Morris says, "I explained that I was certain to recommend that
every Internal-revenue collector in the country be put under
Civil Service." The President replied he was aware of all this
and was undisturbed by it. He went on to say that he and the
Attorney General wanted nothing less than a thoroughgoing and
Impartial Investigation of the federal government and that they
would both co-operate with him in every way. Morris not only
was pleased with the President's apparent enthusiasm for the
undertaking but was strongly drawn by the warmth and candor
he displayed even in the businesslike atmosphere of that first
conference. By the end of the conference, it was officially settled
that Morris would take the job and would be sworn in that same
afternoon. When he and the Attorney General left the President's
office, they were met by the White House correspondents and
photographers. The two men posed together outside the Presi
dent's office, and Morris held an impromptu press conference.
In the course of the questioning, he was asked which agency of
the government he planned to investigate first. At the time, he
had given this problem little thought, and he didn't want to
commit himself with a hasty answer. "Well, now, look here,"
he said after a moment's hesitation. "You fellows know that I've
only just arrived in Washington, and I haven't even " McGrath
broke in and, with a flourish of his cigar, said, "I would be the
first to welcome an investigation." "In that case," Morris said,
"I guess we might just as well start with the Department of
Justice."

McGrath, who was later to say that he regretted ever having
hired his Special Assistant, has not yet said when or why he
became disillusioned about Morris. Morris says his disillusionment
about McGrath, as distinct from his distrust of politicians in

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT $2

general, began, in a small way, a short time after this con
ference. It is characteristic of Morris that some of the things
that disturbed him about McGrath were things that would have
given most other men rather a pleasant impression of the
Attorney General. Morris's suspicions were aroused, for instance,
by McGrath's description of him as "a distinguished lawyer" in
a statement he handed out announcing the new appointment.
Morris also disapproved of McGrath's insistence that he and
Morris go immediately on a "Howard" and "Newbold" basis.
He thought it undignified. Morris was even disturbed by
McGrath's eating habits. When they left the White House,
McGrath took Morris to lunch at the 1925 F Street Club, one
of the most expensive and exclusive institutions in Washington.
"There isn't any place like it in New York," Morris, who is in
the habit of lunching on sandwiches in his office but has got
around a bit in his time, says in admiration. "We had six courses
and wine. It was the most wonderful lunch I ever had. But I
was numb at the base of the brain when we left, and I wondered
how the hell anyone with a job to do could possibly work after a
meal like that." It wa well along in the afternoon by the time
Morris and McGrath left the 1925 Club and went to the De
partment of Justice. There the Attorney General himself ad
ministered the oath to Morris and then released the statement
announcing Morris's appointment and describing him as being,
among other things, "a distinguished lawyer." "I don't suppose
I should have resented that, but I couldn't help being put off by
it," Morris says. "It just wasn't so. Nobody who knows me could
possibly describe me as a distinguished lawyer. I'm a pretty good
lawyer, I think, but that's about the size of it, and the people
who know me know it." Morris was, however, more than satisfied
with most of the other things McGrath said in the announce
ment. It read, in part:

In asking Mr. Morris to accept this assignment, I have assured him
that he will have my complete, enthusiastic, and unlimited cooperation,
and that all of the facilities of the various agencies of the Government
which I administer or which can be made available through the office
of the President will be at his disposal. No one is more anxious than
I, as Attorney General, to have the charge of misconduct in public

22 Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

office thoroughly and impartially sifted, for I realize that the strength
of our system of government depends upon the faith that all men

must have in it.

Morris started work on Monday, February 4, with a good deal
of ceremony. Space had been found for him and his then non
existent staff on the second floor of the Justice Building. His
own office was a richly appointed, high-ceilinged room the size
of a basketball court. "They took me into J. Edgar Hoover's
office once/* he recalls. "It was about as big as my closet." Morris
was given elaborate instructions concerning the operation of the
air-conditioning unit, a key to a private elevator for Very Im
portant Persons, immense quantities of stationery and other
office supplies, and an attractive secretary, whose usefulness was
somewhat impaired by her inability to take dictation, either by
shorthand or by any other method. McGrath introduced him to
all the leading members of the department and asked him to
deliver a talk to the division heads on the purposes and methods
of his investigation. He did so. "I felt as if I were addressing the
Supreme Court," he says. "Anyway they kept their enthusiasm in
check."

That first day, and almost every other day until he left
Justice, Morris was called upon by innumerable young men
bringing him reports of one kind or another some dealing with
interesting old cases that had been tried by department mem
bers, others with the functions of the department and its various
branches, still others with the relations between the department
and other agencies of government. All the reports were hand
somely got up, wrapped in cellophane, and neatly tied with
ribbons, mostly blue, but none of those that Morris dipped into
bore even remotely on the matters he understood he was to
investigate. "I learned a little from the men who carried them
in," he says, "but I'd never have learned a thing from what they
carried/'

Late Monday afternoon, Morris and McGrath had another
talk. McGrath seemed to have the affair of T. Lamar Caudle
very much on his mind. It was McGrath's theory, Morris says,
that Caudle was an honest and conscientious public servant
whose forthrightness and innocence had brought him to grief.

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 94

As an Instance of Caudle's forthrightness, McGrath told Morris
that before accepting a $5,000 commission on the sale of an
airplane, Caudle had come to McGrath and asked if the Attorney
General saw anything irregular in the transaction. The Attorney
General explained to Morris, as he said he had explained to
Caudle, that he personally couldn't see anything wicked in an
airplane salesman getting a commission. Morris agreed with
this, but added that he thought a man who wished to earn com
missions on airplane sales ought to go into the airplane business.
Finally, Morris says, he wearied of discussing the man McGrath
referred to as "poor Lamar." "I said to him," Morris recalls,
" 'Howard, how many of your assistants here do you think are
practicing privately on the side?' " McGrath answered that he
didn't know of any who were. "I'm sure he didn't/' Morris says,
"but I told him that I'd been putting the question to the nice
young fellows who'd been snowing me under with reports all
day and that three of the pleasantest of them had told me they
had outside practices." McGrath said he certainly was surprised
to hear that.

A curious episode occurred in the interval between Morris's
first and second workdays in Washington. On the evening of
Monday, February 4, Morris was In his room in the Carlton
Hotel, where he lived throughout the two-month stay, when he
received a telephone call from a man who identified himself
as Rex Beach. The only Rex Beach Morris had ever heard of
was the novelist, the author of The Spoilers, The Silver Horde,
and other sagas of virility and adventure, most of them set in the
Yukon, that were popular in Morris's childhood. Morris was
under the impression that the author of these books was dead,
(Morris was right. According to newspaper accounts, Beach died
on December 7, 1949. He shot himself in the head with a pistol
at his home In Sebring, Florida.) At any rate, when the caller
gave his name, Morris said, "You mean the novelist? My God,
I thought you were dead!" "Dead! No, I'm feeling fine," the
caller replied. Morris said he was glad to hear this and asked
what Beach wanted of him. Beach said that he had been reading
about Morris's appointment and wished to discuss certain matters.
He proposed that he and Morris have breakfast together in the

^5 Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

Carlton dining room the following morning. Morris, who knew
that it is not good practice for a reformer to meet strangers
particularly novelists one believes to be dead in hotel dining
rooms, dodged the invitation with the explanation that he
planned to breakfast alone in his room while he went over
some papers. He suggested that Beach call his secretary at the
Department of Justice and make an appointment for a meeting
there. He gave the affair little further thought that evening.

The following morning, Morris had breakfast In his room, as
he had planned. When he walked out of the Carlton, intending
to take a cab to his office, he was approached by a man who
introduced himself as the caller of the evening before. "He was
standing In the Carlton driveway/' Morris says, "beside a Cadillac
that looked to me as If It had thirty-two cylinders and was half a
block long." Morris found the whole thing so bewildering that
he no longer remembers all the details. He remembers Beach as
a man of about his own age fifty and rather smartly dressed,
but he has no other impressions of him. Whatever he looked
like, Beach suggested that Morris ride down to the Department
of Justice Building with him, and before Morris knew it, he was
riding along in the big Cadillac, which had a telephone and
was lavishly supplied with fur robes. The car was driven by a
uniformed chauffeur. In the back seat were Morris, Beach, and a
third man, to whom Morris was promptly introduced but whose
name he no longer recalls, though he says it is in files he has
since turned over to the Department of Justice. It was the other
man, rather than Beach, who wished to do business with Morris.
"I don't remember his name, but I do remember what he looked
like," Morris says. "He looked like Clark Gable, but not enough
to be Clark Gable I'm sure of that. He had a fortune in dia
monds on him, all set in onyx and all in Shriners* emblems
an onyx-and-diamond Shriners' ring, an onyx-and-diamond Shrin-
ers" tie clasp, onyx-and-diamond Shriners' cuff links. And he
was smoking a cigar so long it would have singed the chauffeur's
neck If there hadn't been a glass partition in the car. I'd only
ridden a few blocks before I recovered my senses and realized I
had no business being there, but he did a lot of talking in the
time he had/' Morris must have made it apparent that he was

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 9 6

unaware of the Shrlner's reputation, for the latter explained that
such ignorance was evidence of his lack of preparation for the
difficult job he was undertaking. The Shriner told Morris he was
known throughout the country as one of the great private eyes
of the age. "He told me there was one sure way to make a go of
the investigation/' Morris says. "He said that the minute I an
nounced I was considering making him my chief investigator, I'd
get co-operation from all sides. He said that he'd investigated
Republicans for Democrats and Democrats for Republicans and
that he'd be delighted to investigate both of them for me." Morris
feigned interest for a moment and asked the man for his card,
which was produced. At the next traffic light, Morris requested
that the chauffeur let him out. When he got to the Department
of Justice, he turned the card over to an investigator and asked
for an immediate report. "His record was about what I figured/'
he says. "I don't have it any more and don't remember all of
it, but I do remember that his last job was as lobbyist for slot-
machine makers." Morris never heard from the Shriner again, but
he is still curious about him and about Rex Beach.

Morris was fully conscious, during his stay in the Justice
Building, that most of Washington regarded the very fact of his
presence there as proof that his investigation would be a failure
probably an intentional one. He says he was not particularly
bothered by this, for he wanted some time to think the problem
through and he felt that his spacious office in Justice was as good
a place as any to do his thinking. He might even have remained
in it if he had not been strongly urged to get out by three
Washington correspondents who had previously worked in New
York and known him there. He had them to lunch in his room
at the Carlton one day, and they told him that every hour he
spent in Justice, cerebrating or doing anything else, made it less
likely that he would be taken seriously when he was ready to
investigate. He decided to take this problem as well as some
others that had been accumulating in his mind up with the
President, and he put in a bid for an appointment at the White
House. Meanwhile, he kept busy laying his plans and trying to
assemble a staff. It was his view that he could not, in nine months
or ninety, look into the financial affairs of all the 2,500,000 gov-

gj Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

ernment employees. He felt that about all he could do was study
the topmost layers of the great bureaucratic onion, and that
these would give him, and the country, a pretty good idea of the
condition of the many layers beneath. To get the information he
wanted, he needed the power of subpoena, and also financial
statements from all high-ranking government employees. It was
reported later that the questionnaire Morris prepared and the
Justice Department refused to distribute was an afterthought
and that he looked upon it as an alternative to the powers of
subpoena Congress had refused him. He himself says that he
decided on a questionnaire shortly after he took on the assign
ment and that he saw it as a necessary auxiliary to any other
tools of investigation he might use. It was also reported that the
questionnaire was modeled on the one circulated last year among
members of the New York City police force. Morris denies this,
too. When he drew it up with considerable help, in the later
stages, from members of his staff he had, he says, nothing in
mind but gathering the information needed for the job in hand,
and the thought that its mere circulation might be preventive
medicine for any contemplated waywardness. Although it is a
formidable document sixteen pages long and calls for several
hundred items of information, Morris says it is actually less de
tailed than the one the New York police were required to fill
out. For example, where Morris asked the recipient to total his
expenditures in each of the preceding five years, the police ques
tionnaire required annual expenditures to be broken down into
several categories rent, medical expenses, liquor, entertainment,
and so on.

On February 11, Morris discussed the questionnaire with the
President, whose authority he would need in compelling people
to answer, but in the preparatory stages he never discussed it
with the Attorney General or with any other person outside his
own office except his father-in-law, Judge Hand, a man who is
most solicitous for the rights of the individual and who could
see nothing more objectionable in it than in the many invasions
of privacy to which all citizens are liable among them, notably,
the filing of income-tax returns. The only opinion Morris has
ever cited in defense of the questionnaire is one expressed in

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 98

the recently published Mr. President, in which Truman is quoted
as saying, "I think that every public official who gets more than
ten thousand dollars a year ought to show exactly what his out
side income is, if he has any. That should include District
Attorneys, Senators, and Congressmen and everyone in the Fed
eral service. I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be done.
If a fellow is honest, he doesn't care/' Morris might, if he had
wished, have cited a more eloquent and closely reasoned defense
of the principle on which the questionnaire rested a memoran
dum by Franklin D. Roosevelt on the removal of Sheriff
Thomas M. Farley of the County of New York, dated Feb
ruary 24, 1933, in which the late President, who was at that
time Governor of New York, said:

The stewardship of public officers is a serious and sacred trust. . . .
Their personal possessions are invested with a public importance in
the event that their stewardship is questioned. One of their deep
obligations is to recognize this, not reluctantly or with resistance, but
freely. It is in the true spirit of a public trust to give, when personally
called upon, public proof of the nature, source, and extent of their
financial affairs.

It is true that this is not always pleasant. Public service makes many
exacting demands. . . . The State must expect compliance with these
standards, because if popular government is to continue to exist it
must in such matters hold its stewards to a stern and uncompromising
rectitude. It must be a just but a jealous master.

Toward the end of Morris's first week on the job, Matthew
Connelly, who arranges appointments for the President, told
him that an interview had been scheduled for the following
Monday, February 11, in Blair House, at eight o'clock in the
evening. Morris prepared for this as if he were a schoolboy about
to receive a Presidential 'citation for an essay on the conservation
of wildlife. "I got my shoes shined, my pants pressed, and my
hair cut," he says, "and I made sure I didn't get there at seven-
fifty-nine or eight-one but at eight o'clock on the button." A
servant met him at the front door and ushered him into the
small study that the President used for much of his evening work
while the White House was being renovated. The President was
alone in the study. He greeted Morris warmly, and Morris started

gy Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

the conversation off by saying how much he had enjoyed meeting
the President's daughter on a recent occasion in New York. This
pleased the President, and he said that the reason Margaret was
such a good girl was that her mother was a good woman; he
said it was generally true In his experience that children were
no better or worse than their mothers. Morris took a chair near
the President's desk, which was piled high with papers. The
President said he had brought them over from his White House
office and expected to go through them that evening; most of
them, he explained, were reports on Korea and other parts of
the world beset by troubles larger than boodle and graft. Among
them, however, the President went on, was a report dealing with
exactly those Issues, which he thought Morris ought to see, and
he began riffling through the papers to find it. It proved elusive,
and Morris suggested that the hunt be abandoned. He said that
the time they had together would be of most benefit to him if
he could talk freely for a few minutes. If, at a later date, the
President found the report, Morris could read it In his own
office. The President said that sounded sensible, and leaned back
while Morris talked. "I talked fast/' Morris says. "I told him
first off that I thought I'd better stick to the top levels and not
get snarled up with petty graft down below. He agreed. I told
him that when I said top levels, I meant exactly that, and that I
felt he shouldn't be satisfied with any Investigation that didn't go
right Into his office. I told him I planned to look Into all the
affairs of Harry Vaughan and everyone else In the White House.
The President said he'd be delighted if I'd give everyone there
a thorough going over. I told him about the questionnaire. He
said he thought it was a fine idea and that he'd always been
for something of that sort I told him that in my opinion what
the federal government needed was not just a one-shot investiga
tion but the establishment of a permanent nonpartisan com
mission an agency like the Department of Investigation In New
York City to keep a running account of everything that goes
on. He slapped his knee and said that was a wonderful idea.
He asked me to draw him up a memorandum on It, which I
later did. I told him I wanted to get out of McGrath's office. I
said I'd need 20,000 square feet of floor space somebody or

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 100

other gave me that figure and an appropriation of my own.
He said that finding the space might be rough but that he'd see
to it I got it. Finally, I told him that I wanted an executive
order authorizing me to go ahead and directing every agency to
give me top priority for the things I was after. I said I didn't
want an 'administrative memorandum' but an 'executive order/
I knew they were the same thing, but the public doesn't know
it, and 'executive order' would be more impressive. And I said
I wanted him to use 'top priority/ or 'highest priority/ because
that would show the country and the government that he and
I meant business. And I said I wanted him to ask Congress to
give me the power of subpoena right away. He said he'd take
care of all these things, and he did/'

Morris stayed at Blair House for an hour and a half, dis
cussing, at the President's request, a good many things besides
the ones he had placed on the agenda. He left in a state of
exhilaration. "I'd always liked the President and thought of him
as a man who'd risen above himself," Morris says. "But I'd
never respected him as much as I did that night. It was the high
point of the whole two months. I could see that McGrath was
counting on a whitewash, and I hadn't found anyone else who
was panting to help us, but I'd felt all along that it was the
attitude of the President that counted, and that night I was
sure he was with me." On February 14, the White House re
leased a statement, in which the President said:

I have had a good conference with Mr. Newbold Morris about his
plans for carrying out his job as Special Assistant to the Attorney
General.

I am directing all departments and agencies of the government to
cooperate fully with Mr. Morris . . . and to give him any information
and assistance he may require and to give the highest priority to any
requests made by him. Adequate funds will be provided for the ac
tivities of Mr. Morris and his staff, and they will be given separate
office space outside the Department of Justice.

I intend to see to it that Mr. Morris has access to all information
he needs that is in possession of the Executive branch. . . . How
ever, in many cases where government employees have been
subject to outside influence, the most essential evidence is not in

jor Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

government hands. . . . Accordingly, 1 am going to ask the Congress

to give Mr. Morris the subpoena powers necessary to the proper per
formance of his duties. . .

Mr. Morris will have my full support, and I intend to follow the prog
ress of his work very closely. I hope that he will also have the full sup
port of the Congress and the public.

While arrangements were being made mainly by Carl Blais-
deli, a Defense Department expert on office logistics who was on
loan to Morris to move Morris into the downtown building
that formerly housed the Washington Post, Morris necessarily
continued to put in a good deal of time at Justice. The whole
experience, in Justice and only to a slightly lesser extent later
in the Post building, where Morris was physically removed from
McGrath's agency but still a part of it, remains a zany memory.
No display of impatience on his part could stop the young men
from wandering in with their irrelevant reports. After he said
he was more interested in complaints than reports, he kept on
getting reports, but he got complaints, too a mountain of them.
The first one he read came from a farmer somewhere in the
rutabaga country who was outraged because his mortgage was
about to be foreclosed; Morris was even provided with a copy of
the man's deed. In his first few weeks on the job, the only half
way pertinent complaint he was given came from a girl who
rushed up to him in Union Station one day and said she was
employed by the Justice Department (as part of her dossier, she
carried a letter from Senator Pat McCarran asking that she be
appointed) but never was given any work to do. She couldn't
stand inactivity and thought Morris might be able to release her
from it. Morris got the impression that inactivity was widespread
in the department, though he received no other complaints about
it. Whenever McGrath, who was never less than amiable in those
days, was in Washington, he seldom missed an opportunity to
invite Morris to prolonged lunches at the 1925 Club. After ac
cepting a few times, Morris began to plead previous engagements.
He also commenced to wonder how the department managed
to get any of its cases tried. "I found out," he says. "Every
division has a few Harvard Law Review types really first-class
lawyers working like dogs, but there are an awful lot of people

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 102

who make sure the air conditioning is right and now and then
move a report from one office to another." He found no lack
of legal shrewdness in the department. For example, in drawing
up the formal recommendation to Congress that he be given the
power of subpoena, the department went beyond the President's
request and asked that Morris be given the power to confer im
munity upon co-operative witnesses. Morris had not asked for
this power and did not particularly want it. He realized that if
he received everything the President had asked for, it would be
an almost unbelievable grant of power. To ask for the right to
confer immunity was, he thought, to go one step too far, and he
anticipated that this request would alienate many Congressmen.
In his present suspicious frame of mind, he thinks the Justice
Department may have anticipated the same thing. Nevertheless,
the request for immunity power was made, and Morris's fears
were realized. (Hearing of the request, Senator Karl Mundt, of
South Dakota, said, "It is difficult to see how Hitler himself
could have cloaked his associates with more power to protect
friends and to punish enemies.") If in some respects the depart
ment was eager to broaden the scope of Morris's powers, it
seemed to wish them narrowed down in others. The President's
order had been clear about Morris's right to have his own as
sistants, and the recommendation to Congress as originally
drafted provided that the power of subpoena be granted to not
more than three members of Morris's staff. Somewhere along
the line, the wording was changed so that the power was re
quested for not more than three Assistant Attorneys General
in other words, three members of McGrath's staff. Morris hap
pened to catch this change, and he protested to the President's
counsel, Charles Murphy, who saw to it that the original wording
was restored. Morris never got the power of subpoena or of
granting immunity.

Morris was having difficulty persuading people to join his
staff, and this fact was reported in, and often exaggerated by,
the newspapers, a circumstance that, of course, increased the
difficulty. (In one case, a man Morris had not even approached
announced his refusal to join him.) Nevertheless, Morris put
together the rudiments of a first-class staff. His chief assistant was

xc?3 Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

a tall, loosely built man with a melancholy face named Morton
Baum a Republican who had served with Morris on the Board
of Aldermen and had later joined the La Guardia administration
as a special tax counsel. Morris's chief counsel, who was to func
tion as chief investigator, was Samuel Becker; he had been
general counsel to Philip La Follette, the former governor of
Wisconsin, and from 1935 to 1937 had conducted the Federal
Communications Commission's investigation of the telephone in
dustry. Baum and Becker, like Morris himself, interrupted
private practices in New York for the investigation. Once the
three of them were together, they started building an organiza
tion. Almost immediately, they ran into that great misery of
government administrators, the security check. They were told
that they couldn't put anyone on the payroll until the F.B.L
had made a thorough investigation of his background, character,
reputation, and reading tastes. This rigorous survey could take
months. Morris and Baum called on A. Devitt Vanech, the
Deputy Attorney General, and proposed that instead of actually
putting people on the payroll, they hire them on a per-diem
basis as "consultants." Vanech was none too sure about the
propriety of this and said he would take it up with McGrath.
McGrath was none too sure about it either, but finally, throwing
caution to the winds, he approved the arrangement. Getting
people to accept on that not so attractive basis, however, pre
sented one more difficulty, and even that wasn't all. "One day,
we thought we had a windfall," Baum said recently. "We heard
that the Federal Trade Commission was going to let twelve
excellent men go, because it didn't have the money to keep them.
But we couldn't lay our hands on them. The F.B.I, thought they
ought to be checked, even though they'd been on the F.T.C. pay
roll for quite a while. We suggested that to get around this they
simply be kept on the F.T.C. payroll while we requisitioned
their services and reimbursed the F.T.C. from our own funds. It
never did work out, though I think we were right on the verge of
getting them* when McGrath got us."

In the dispute that ultimately arose between Morris and the
Attorney General, the most widely publicized of Morris's ad
ventures in Washington his appearances before the Senate

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 104

Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations played no part at
all. On March 11 and 12, Morris testified before the committee,
which had for some time been looking into the sale of surplus
government tankers. It wanted to see what light Morris could
throw on the operations of a group, headed by a former Con
gressman named Joseph E. Casey, that was said to have made a
profit of $3,250,000 on an investment of $101,000 in surplus
tankers. Morris's law firm had represented two of the tanker
firms that figured in the huggermugger operations of the Casey
group (the group, incidentally, had included Fleet Admiral
William F. Halsey, Retired, and the late Secretary of State
Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.), and Morris himself was the unpaid
president of the China International Foundation, which dis
bursed certain tanker profits in the form of scholarships to
Chinese students whose education in their homeland had been
disrupted in consequence of their Nationalist sympathies. It
was brought out that some of these profits had been made by
the delivery, in vessels owned by the United Tanker Corporation,
which was represented by Morris's firm and whose stock was
owned by the Foundation, of four shipments of oil to the
Chinese mainland in 1949 and 1950. As far as representing the
tanker firms was concerned, Morris argued before the com
mittee that lawyers are not responsible for any corporation they
represent unless they are officers of the corporation; Lovejoy,
Morris, Wasson & Huppuch, he said, had not counseled any il
legal actions on the part of the corporations. He was aware, he
said, that some of United's ships had delivered oil to Communist
China (the four trips to the Chinese mainland were part of a
total of more than two hundred trips United's tankers had made
throughout the world during the two years in question), but he
was also aware that the oil deliveries, all of which took place
before the Korean war, had been sanctioned by the State De
partment and had been discontinued promptly when the Eco
nomic Cooperation Administration urged that this be done.
Morris said that he himself had not received a dollar from the
operations of any of the tankers, but he did admit that his share
of the legal fees for representing the owners was probably in
the neighborhood of $30,000.

joj Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

A fair number of people In Washington felt that Morris's role
in all this would prove a continuing source of embarrassment to
his Investigation. A larger number, while not necessarily holding
this opinion, felt that Morris's petulant response to some of the
questioning was censurable, despite the fact that the provocation
had been great. Senator McCarthy talked about Morris's reaping
profits "soaked In American blood." Morris accused McCarthy of
subjecting him to an ordeal similar to the one Joseph Cardinal
Mindszenty endured at the hands of Hungarian Communists.
In the opinion of almost everyone In Washington, both McCarthy
and Morris overstated their cases. None of this, however, bore on
the conflict between Morris and McGrath, for McGrath, the
President, and just about everyone else In the administration
shared Morris's view that the affair of the tankers in no way
disqualified him for the task at hand. Many members of the
administration were inclined to think better of Morris because
of his defiance of Senator McCarthy. In any event, he felt en
couraged to stay on in Washington.

The tanker question, the difficulties of getting a staff together,
the problem of operating without the power of subpoena, and
most of Morris's other troubles seemed outwardly, anyway to
have been reasonably well surmounted by the week of March 3 1,
the week that began with McGrath's statement that he was sorry
he'd ever hired Morris and ended with Morris's firing and
McGrath's resignation. From around the middle of March on,
things had appeared to be going smoothly, on the whole. A
staff of about fifty had been put together and preparations were
being made to double it, complaints were being received In fair
volume, and the staff investigators were getting their work well
organized. Morris had had another highly satisfactory interview
with the President. It had taken place shortly after Morris ap
peared on a television program called "Meet the Press," in the
course of which he said some characteristically severe things
about General Vaughan and Ambassador William O'Dwyer. The
President wanted Morris to know that he bore Morris no resent
ment for these judgments and was still behind him. About
General Vaughan he made what seemed to Morris an odd but
touching point. The President directed Morris's attention to a

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 106

small piece of sculpture on the mantelpiece. "Do you know who
gave me that?" the President said, quickly answering his own
question. "Harry Vaughan's daughter did. She made it, and she's
just graduating from art school. I have a daughter, too, you
know, and Harry Vaughan is my friend. You say what you want
about him; that's what you're here for, but Harry Vaughan is
still my friend." When Morris left, he received still another
assurance that the President, as President, was behind him.

A grand jury was to be set up on Monday, April 7, and al
though Morris did not expect to be in a position to seek any
indictments by then, he was hopeful that the jury could be kept
sitting until something good broke. He planned to use it the
way Miles McDonald, the District Attorney in Brooklyn, used
the grand jury whose sessions resulted in the exposure of Harry
Gross's bookmaking ring that is, not chivvying witnesses and
trying to get them to admit specific crimes but leading them
along more or less at random in the expectation that they would
sooner or later talk themselves into trouble. Meanwhile, the
questionnaire had been printed and Morris was planning to
distribute it. There was a rather nightmarish touch in connec
tion with his efforts to do so. It turned out that nowhere in
the government is there any file or index that tells who occupies
what job. The Budget Bureau has a complete list, by grade and
title, of all the jobs in all the agencies, but neither it nor any
other body has a list of the people who fill the positions. It
might seem reasonable to suppose that there are officials in every
division of the government (when the Hoover Commission
counted up a few years ago, it found a total of 1,816 "com
ponent parts") who know who their own employees are, but no
one knows or can easily find out who anyone else's employees
are. Thus, when Morris, with the aid of Baum, studied govern
ment charts and job descriptions to determine which employees
should get the questionnaires, he found he had no way of taking
the next step mailing them out to the jobholders. He and
Baum decided they would have to deliver the questionnaires to
the heads of the various agencies and ask them to fit the names to
the jobs before passing them along. In Justice, to which Morris,
aided by a platoon of porters, delivered the first bundles by

joy Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

hand, It was maintained for a while that not even in the depart
ment itself was there any way of finding out the names of the
596 employees who were to receive the documents. But Morris
and Becker protested, and finally a list was found. The copies
of the questionnaire, though, remained in McGrath's office until,
presumably, the garbage men got them.

Morris is now inclined to the view that the investigation never
had any chance of succeeding. He feels that the smooth sailing
of the penultimate weeks was a mere illusion. This illusion, he
thinks, rested on the illusion on the part of McGrath and others
that Morris would not do a really serious job of investigation.
"They let us alone for a while because they thought we were
going to let them alone/' he says. He believes it probable that
if he had started with some other department, he would have
encountered the same kind of resistance. The only administra
tion leader besides McGrath with whom Morris discussed the
questionnaire at any length was John Snyder, the Secretary of
the Treasury. Snyder said he felt that its distribution would
demoralize his department. Morris pointed out that the public
had the impression that the Treasury Department, which was
next in line after Justice, was already in an advanced state of
demoralization. Snyder said he thought the public had the wrong
impression. It was clear that he was against the plan and would
be a reluctant collaborator. Although it was in the course of
testifying about the questionnaire before the Chelf Subcommittee
of the House Judiciary Committee that McGrath indignantly
said he was out of sympathy with Morris's program an erup
tion that led directly to the departure of both men what
actually brought matters to a head, in the opinion of Morris and
his associates, was a far less controversial question. In the ab
sence of any statement by McGrath, there can, of course, be
nothing but speculation as to the real basis of his conduct during
the week of March 31, but Morris and most of those who were
associated with him argue that it was McGrath's resistance to
disclosing any information about the conduct of his own office
that caused the blowup. Just as Morris was on the point of
getting to work on McGrath's office that is, of accepting the
invitation issued by McGrath in the White House on February i

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 108

McGrath's attitude began to change. An order came through
stating that there were to be no more additions to Morris's staff
without the Attorney General's approval. When Morris tried to
get this order set aside, he was unable to find McGrath any
where. McGrath was in Rhode Island McGrath was out to
lunch McGrath hadn't arrived in the office yet McGrath had
left early McGrath was in conference McGrath was indisposed.
"I finally did see him on March 25th/' Morris says, "and he
agreed to junk this order and to do most of the other things I
asked, but I had a kind of sense that we were heading into the
biggest crisis yet, even while outwardly the investigation ap
peared to be building up steam in a hurry. I felt there was real
trouble ahead, though I can't say I had any premonition of the
way it was all going to work out. The truth is I never doubted
that we would succeed. I thought the President wanted us to
succeed and that his support was all we needed."

On March 26, Morris and Becker decided that the time had
come to force McGrath to put up or shut up. An appointment
was made for Becker to call on McGrath that afternoon and
make arrangements for beginning the investigation of the Attor
ney General's office. The appointment was set for half past three.
Becker arrived then and was alone with McGrath for forty-five
minutes. In a memorandum on the interview that Becker pre
pared for Morris, he wrote that he started out by "telling [Mc
Grath] that we had no reason to doubt that the affairs of the
Department were properly handled." This was not quite as dis
ingenuous a remark as it may appear to be, Morris and Becker
say, for it was understood that they were talking not of efficient
and intelligent management but of the financial honesty of
McGrath and his immediate subordinates, which, they say, they
still have no reason to question. "I said," Becker continued in
his report, "that my guess was that if any improprieties or ir
regularities turned up, they would probably be on the same
administrative level as in the Treasury. Under such circum
stances, it was to the interest of the Department to make the
facts known promptly, so that any rumors or charges could be
set to rest." McGrath seemed to be in agreement with all this
and, indeed, with most of the things Becker said. The copies of

jog Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

the questionnaire still had not been distributed, and when
Becker brought this up, McGrath assured him they would go
out before the end of the day. Becker made certain proposals
for speeding up the process of getting the people Morris wanted
to hire cleared by the F.B.I, and put on the federal payroll.
McGrath said he thought these proposals reasonable, and asked
that he be supplied with a list of those Morris wanted most
urgently to employ, so that he could attend to the speed-up
himself. On all matters of organization, McGrath was, on the
evidence of Becker's memorandum, more co-operative on March
26 than he had been at any time since early February.

At last, Becker arrived at the question that he expected
trouble about. "I suggested/* he wrote in his memorandum,
"that we would want promptly to commence our regular, routine
examination of the files in accordance with the procedure that
is customary and usual in investigations of this nature, similar
to public investigations in which I had been engaged and very
much like the investigations that the Anti-Trust Division [in
the Department of Justice] now makes/* Becker went on to
explain that the simplest procedure, in his view, was to start at
the very top of the heap and work down. McGrath asked Becker
exactly what records he wished to have, and Becker said he
wanted all the records. He mentioned specifically "correspond
ence, diaries, appointment books, records of telephone calls/*
It has lately been reported in the press that when Becker asked
for these, McGrath grew angry and shouted his refusal. Becker,
whose laconic memorandum does not deal with McGrath's atti
tude, says that this was not at all the case. He says that McGrath
was calm and extremely courteous throughout the interview,
that he recognized Becker's role as Morris's emissary Morris had
sent Becker to McGrath instead of going himself because he felt
that Becker was a more adroit and self-controlled interviewer
and that he did not raise his voice once in the forty-five minutes
they were together. But when Becker explained in detail what
he was after, McGrath, according to the memorandum, "in
formed me that he would not consent to such examinations and
would not give access to the files except on a most restricted
basis; that is to say, if any evidence were furnished suggesting

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT no

any misconduct or impropriety and specific files were called for,
he would make them available." Becker pointed out that this
would help very little, since it was in the records themselves that
he expected to find the evidence McGrath was demanding as a
prerequisite for turning over the records. McGrath said that that
was too bad, but he had made his mind up on this point. Further
more, Becker went on in his memorandum, McGrath "said that
he would in no case permit examination of his own records. . . .
I told him that I thought the Presidential directive was in the
nature of a subpoena to all government departments to make
available and to give access to all the records of the departments
or persons in the departments relating to their general work.*'
McGrath said that he didn't think it covered the things Becker
was asking for. Becker reminded him that the President had
authorized Morris to have "all information he needs that is in
possession of the Executive branch" and that he couldn't see
how this excluded anything. "I suggested," Becker wrote, "that
the limitations he imposed were contrary to the executive order
and it seemed to me that matters of that nature were not open
to discussion between us or between him and you." McGrath
said that this might be true but that he intended to discuss it
himself with the President. McGrath also said that he felt there
was a certain unfairness about Morris's having singled out the
Department of Justice for attack. "I told him," Becker wrote,
"that this was the purest coincidence; it originated [in] his in
vitation to you at the time of your appointment and the press
conference which followed." McGrath said he considered it un
fair nonetheless. With that, the interview ended, and Becker
returned to his office to write his memorandum, which con
cluded with the statement that "unless this question [of the
conflict with McGrath] is answered satisfactorily before the end
of next week, I see nothing further for us to do."

That was March 26. Neither Morris nor anyone in his office
saw McGrath or any of McGrath's assistants after that. On
Monday, March 31, McGrath testified before the Chelf Subcom
mittee. He said he was undecided whether to distribute the
questionnaire and whether to fill out his own copy. Asked if he
would hire Morris if he had it to do over again, he said he

in Mr. Morris Goes to Washington

would not. On Wednesday, April 2, McGrath saw the President
in the White House for fifteen minutes. It is not yet known what
was said at that meeting. McGrath saw the President again in
the afternoon, at the National Airport, and a few snatches of
conversation were overheard by reporters, but no one is sure
exactly what was under discussion. The following morning, Mc
Grath fired Morris. At a few minutes after four that afternoon,
the President, in his press conference, announced that McGrath
had resigned and had been succeeded by Federal Judge James P.
McGranery. At the conference, the President was asked a number
of questions about Morris's dismissal, but he contributed very
little information in his replies. These are some of the exchanges
that bore on the mystery:

QUESTION: Did Mr. McGrath fire Moms with your knowledge
and approval?

ANSWER: * The President said he saw it in the paper.

Q.: I take it, Mr. President, that you didn't know about it
before McGrath

A.: The President said it was under discussion but that he was
not consulted when it was done.

<>.: Were you consulted before it was done?

A.: The President said he was talked to about it but that he
made no suggestion about it.

Q.: Why was Mr. Morris fired? Do you think his dismissal was
justified?

A.: The President said he couldn't answer the question.

Q.: Do you intend to reinstate Mr. Morris?

A.: The President said he couldn't answer the question. He
said that he had a new Attorney General.

Q.: I wonder what is your opinion of the celebrated ques
tionnaire of Mr. Morris?

A.: The President said he had never seen one so he couldn't
answer a question like that.

Q.: Mr. President, could I ask whether you have any reason to
feel dissatisfied with Mr. Morris's work?

A.: The President said he couldn't answer the question.

* President Truman did not authorize direct quotation.

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 112

Q. (by Mrs. Elisabeth May Craig, a correspondent for a
number of papers in Maine): Mr. President, I'm, I'm . . .

A.: The President observed that Mrs. Craig was kind of tangled
up, wasn't she?

Q.: Well, sir, I am, because we understood that Mr. Morris
was your man to conduct [the investigation] and now he is fired
and you don't tell us whether it is in your opinion a justified
dismissal. It leaves Mr. Morris under a cloud.

A.: The President said Morris was hired by the Attorney Gen
eral, brought down by the Attorney General, and the Attorney
General fired him.

Q.: And we were wrong in thinking he was your man?

A.: The President said he wasn't his man. He said he never
was.

The next morning, Morris went down to the Washington Post
building, gathered up a few belongings, and taxied to Union
Station with a friend a New York journalist who now and then
looks in on Washington. They boarded the Morning Congres
sional and, over drinks in a compartment, rehashed the whole
affair.

When Morris reached Pennsylvania Station, it looked fine to
him.

The Kept Witnesses

1955

ON FEBRUARY 3, 1955* a press conference was called at the Hotel
Biltmore in New York City for the purpose of providing a
young man named Harvey Matusow with an opportunity to
make a public confession of fraud and perjury. Along with the
confession and necessary as a foundation for it went some
items of biography.

In 1947, Matusow, who was then twenty, joined the Com
munist party. He claims to have taken this step as a dedicated
revolutionist. Within a year or two, he said, he became dis
illusioned and penitent. The way of transgressors is hard.
Matusow did not leave the party he no longer believed in.
Instead, he stayed on as a voluntary agent of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation. In 1951, he abandoned this masquerade and in
1952 appeared as a witness for the prosecution in the trial, in
federal court, of thirteen leaders of the Communist party charged
with conspiracy under the Smith Act.

Matusow's performance under oath some seven hundred pages
in the trial record pleased the government attorneys, who won
their case, and gained him an honored position as a kept, or
professional, witness. That is to say, he made his living and a
very good one, he now maintains, for a man of his age and
station by being sworn and saying what those who paid him
wished to have him say. Between 1951 and 1954, his services
were sought, and easily obtained, by the United States Depart
ment of Justice, the Subversive Activities Control Board, the
Permanent Investigations Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT

114

Committee, the House Committee on Un-American Activities,
the Ohio Committee on Un-American Activities, and the New
York. City Board of Education. He claims to have testified in
twenty-five trials, deportation proceedings, and the like, and to
have made 180 identifications of Communists, or of persons he
chose to call Communists, for the various agencies that em
ployed him. He found a good deal of additional employment.
He hired out as a speaker in Congressional campaigns, In which,
for a fee, he would damage this candidate or that one with
intimations of subversion. He composed memoirs and revelations
for the Hearst newspapers, lectured on the American Legion
circuit, and now and then exploited himself and his past as a
night-club entertainer and radio disc jockey.

In his New York press conference and in subsequent testimony
before a federal grand jury and two committees of Congress,
Matusow repudiated his career as a professional witness. He ex
plained that he had walked down a city street one day and had
been deeply moved by an eloquent call to piety and virtue
which he found inscribed on a sign outside a synagogue. He had
not been living the good life. The testimony he had given was
riddled with lies. In case after case, he told the assembled re
porters, he had fabricated evidence, sometimes on his own initia
tive, sometimes at the Instigation of government lawyers.

He was now filing affidavits in support of requests for new
trials for many of those he had helped convict. Such was his
remorse that he was willing, he said, to risk the penalties of
perjury to undo the damage he had done.

This, at any rate, is Matusow's story. And it appears to have
something in common with the stories of at least two other
people. Mrs. Marie Natvig and Lowell Watson, government
witnesses in a recent proceeding before the Federal Communica
tions Commission, have given the lie to their testimony. Both
swore before the F.C.C. that they had known as a Communist
one Edward Lamb, an Erie, Pennsylvania, newspaper publisher
whose right as a television licensee had been called into question.
Mrs. Natvig, a gaudy triple divorcee from Miami Beach, now
says she lied not only about Lamb's Communist record but about
her own. She had invented a Communist past for herself in

jj5 The Kept Witnesses

order to Identify others as Communists. Watson, a Kansas farmer
who, like Matusow, had worked often for the Justice Department,
disowned only his avouchments in the Lamb case.

The recantations necessarily leave many matters in doubt. It
is the misfortune of skillful dissemblers that their fellows can
never give full faith or credit to anything they say. The regenera
tion of Matusow, Mrs. Natvig, and Watson may be causing un
bounded joy in heaven, but here it must be received with the
cool skepticism that should have greeted their sworn testimony.
"A liar is always lavish of oaths," Pierre Comeille wrote three
hundred years ago in Le Menteur, one of the great definitive
works on the subject. The courts, the committees, the com
missions, and the security panels before which Matusow and
Mrs. Natvig were lavish of oaths will be a long time working
over the tangled skein of evidence put in the record by this
bedeviled youth and this odd woman.

And certainly in Matusow's case those who preside will, if they
are possessed of the thoughtfulness the task requires, be haunted
by the possibility that he has not really recovered his amateur
standing that he is, in point of fact, as much a professional as
ever. Now he has written a book about his experiences. His
press conference was called by the publishers of the book, the
firm of Cameron 8c Kahn. There was a distinctly promotional air
about the whole enterprise, and there was a distinctly Stalinist
air about it, too. Cameron 8c Kahn is a house that up to now
has specialized in Communist literature. In any case, Matusow,
whether genuinely purified or merely reverting to form, is once
again capitalizing on the confidences of former associates; now
he is putting the finger not on Communists but on anti-Com
munists on Senator Joseph McCarthy, on Roy M. Cohn, on all
his collaborators of the last four or five years. Is he once again
on somebody's payroll? It is an uncharitable thought but an
inescapable one.

"This is a good racket, being a professional witness," Matusow
told the reporters when Cameron & Kahn broke out the Scotch
at the Biltmore. Immediately the conference was over, he hurried
to the Columbia Broadcasting Company studios for a telecast.

The Department of Justice announced, soon after Matusow's

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 116

confession, that it would be among the agencies reviewing and
re-evaluating the recanted testimony. The anonymous spokesmen
for the Attorney General were a bit grudging and condescending
about it. They pointed out that Matusow had given only "cor
roborative" testimony, as though this were some unimportant
species of testimony, hardly worth the bother of looking into.
(Actually, there is no special category of evidence known as
"corroborative." It merely means, in this instance, that Matusow
testified to facts also testified to by one or more other witnesses.
Not only can two witnesses be wrong, but there are circum
stances in which the withdrawal of one witness's testimony
destroys the legal value of another's.) But after Matusow ap
peared before the grand jury, and after Mrs. Natvig and Watson
revealed their fabrications, the Department of Justice promised
a full investigation. Bearing the honorable name it does, it could
hardly do less. Men are in prison today in part because of
evidence drawn from a confessed perjurer by department lawyers.

Neither the Department of Justice nor any other agency of
government, however, has given any indication that the Matusow
incident has led it to reconsider the moral, juridical, and political
effects of the whole practice of retaining professional witnesses.
On the contrary, it would appear that the government's prin
cipal concern at this stage is to prevent Matusow's latest set of
confessions from discrediting the testimony of its other pro
fessionals. A federal judge has jailed him on the ground that
his recantation is false and contemptuous and the department
has indicted Mrs. Natvig, not for the perjury she admits, but
for having lied to its lawyers.

In a sense, of course, the government is profoundly right in
wishing to protect its employees. One embezzler does not make
thieves of all bankers. One spy in the State Department does
not prove all diplomats disloyal. One perjurious witness for the
government does not make liars of all the rest. Yet there is a
difference. Matusow was asserting not the unverifiable but the
self-evident when he said that it had been "a good racket, being
a professional witness/' As rackets must be judged, it was a good
one for him, certainly; and, since Matusow's talents are unusual
but not unexampled, it may, at this moment, be equally good

XI j The Kept Witnesses

for others. And if It is a good racket for anyone, It is a racket for
which the government of the United States must bear the heaviest
responsibility. For it is the government of the United States
"that august conception/* as Samuel Taylor Coleridge once
called it that originated this racket and that continues to en
courage and pay for it. Matusow was in partnership with the
government.

The government's use of professional witnesses has at least
this much in common with a racket that information about it
is exceedingly difficult to come by. The whole affair is veiled in
secrecy. The government will not talk. It does not, because
plainly it cannot, plead that the safety of the nation would be
imperiled if it revealed the number and the identity of those
whom it hires to testify according to the wishes of its lawyers. It
does not plead the right to withhold the names on the ground
that these people are confidential informers; obviously it cannot
do that in the case of men and women who appear in open
court. The government gives no reasons for its unwillingness to
discuss or even to defend this phase of its operations, but it
evidently holds to the view that it would not be in the public
interest to make any sort of public accounting in this matter.*

* On December 20, 1954, I wrote the Attorney General to request facts on
the use of professional witnesses and the department's "response, if it has
made one, to critics of the practice." I pointed out that there had been,
even then, a good deal of public discussion of the question, and I noted that
it suffered from the lack "of the kind of solid information I imagine the
Department of Justice could provide." I got no reply until February 10 of
this year, which was a few days after the Matusow recantation. I then
received a letter from William F. Tompkins, Assistant Attorney General in
charge of the new Internal Security Division. Mr. Tompkins merely ac
knowledged receipt of my letter and enclosed copies of two speeches, one
by Assistant Attorney General Warren Olney, III, delivered before the
Michigan Association of Prosecuting Attorneys on July 23, 1954- and one
by himself, delivered before the Camden County, New Jersey, Bar Associa
tion on September 28, 1954. Both speeches are addressed to the problem, but
neither really deals with it. Both assume that the sanction the courts have
given to paid informers can be extended to professional witnesses. Both
contain some rather handsome specimens of question-begging. For example,
Mr Tompkins: "The testimony of these witnesses has been weighed by
numerous American juries and found to be credible. Of the eighty-four de
fendants who have been tried thus far for conspiring to violate the Smith
Act eighty-one have been convicted and only one has been acquitted by a
jury A more convincing yardstick of the credibility of those witnesses I

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 118

In mid- 1954, though, some enterprising Washington journal
ists came into possession of a Department of Justice list which
contained the names and earnings of thirty persons "regularly
used as witnesses" and of fifty-three "occasionally used" in the
period, spanning two administrations, between July i, 1952 and
May 31, 1954. This list has been made public, and the depart
ment has not to date challenged its authenticity.

Whether the list was complete is not known. It was specified
that the eighty-three named were all under contract to the
Immigration and Naturalization Service of the department.
There are others in other bureaus of the department and in
other executive agencies, and there are known to be several
working for the legislative branch and the state governments.
American public life on almost every level today is characterized
by what can only be described as an obsession with problems of
loyalty and internal security; it is a rare public agency that does
not have at least one division devoting itself to these problems,
and it is a downright underprivileged one that does not have
some judicial or semijudicial apparatus for making the kind of
distinctions the ruling obsession demands. These apparatuses
require witnesses.

At all odds, the Department of Justice had at least eighty-
three kept witnesses in 1954. It seems wholly reasonable to
assume that, despite the defection of Harvey Matusow, the num
ber is not smaller today. More likely than not, it is larger, for
the new Internal Security Division of the department, which
came into being on July 9 of last year, has announced that it
plans greatly to accelerate its work in this field and aspires to
produce an ever-mounting volume of prosecutions under the
Smith Act, the Communist Control Act of 1954, and all other
available statutes.

Of the eighty-three persons retained by the department in
1954, all were, by their own admission, former members of the
Communist party. Some, like Benjamin Gitlow, one of the first

cannot imagine." Neither speech, provides any solid information. More re
cently, in testimony before a Senate committee, Tompkins has said: "It
has become increasingly clear that the current attack against government
witnesses . . . has its roots in a Communist effort."

jjp The Kept Witnesses

American Bolsheviks and once Communist candidate for Vice-
President, had been true believers; others, like Matthew Cvetic,
whose exploits as an undercover agent were celebrated in a
radio serial called "I Was a Communist for the FBI," had been
quite the opposite but had infiltrated the party at the direction
of Mr. Hoover's famous agency. A few, like Harvey Matusow,
had made the transition from revolutionist to coun ten-evolu
tionist Inside the party. Those who are public servants now
receive $25 a day plus $9 "In lieu of expenses." These, at least,
are the sums that have been brought out on cross-examination
In several trials and hearings. Some witnesses may receive more,
others less; $34 a day appears to be the prevailing fee.

By government standards, this is fairly high pay. And il Is high
in comparison with what some of the kept witnesses made before
entering government service. Harvey Matusow was earning $35 a
week in 1951. The job formerly held by Paul Crouch who
earned $9,675 from the department in two years of witnessing
was as an airline employee at eighty-five cents an hour. Leonard
Patterson was a New York taxi driver. Many of the others were
paid functionaries of the Communist party, which means that
their pay was low and infrequent. To satisfy the statute under
which the payments are authorized the General Services and
Administrative Act of 1949 the people who receive them are
carried on the books not as kept witnesses but as "expert con
sultants." But kept witnesses is what in fact they are; such use
fulness as they may be said to have derives from their ability
and readiness to identify people as Communists, to describe
Communist activities for the enlightenment of judges, juries, and
security panels, and to interpret Communist doctrine in such a
way as to bring it within the area proscribed by the Smith Act.

Some critics notably Joseph and Stewart Alsop, who first
brought the problem of kept witnesses to public attention have
urged that a distinction be made between those who have been
paid large sums and those who have been paid small sums. It is
proper, they point out, to describe a witness such as Manning
Johnson, who is credited with earnings of 19,096 in a two-year
period, as a professional. However, some on the department list
are credited with amounts that can only be considered as pin

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT I20

money: $200 or $300 in twenty-six months. Obviously, some sort
of distinction ought to be made between those who earn enough
to live on and those who do not. But because of the depart
ment's refusal to provide information, it is impossible to do this.
In an act of high magnanimity, the Alsops accepted the boot
legged list from the department and concluded that there were
only twelve witnesses "who have earned enough so that one may
reasonably presume the sums were meaningful to them." Harvey
Matusow was not one of the twelve, for the Department of
Justice had him down as a witness "occasionally used" and listed
his earnings as only $75. It has since developed that the one list
so far circulated tells only part of the story. Matusow got $75
from the Immigration and Naturalization Service and $1,407
from a separate account with the Attorney General's office.

There are certain ironies connected with the purely pro
cedural aspects of the department's relations with its paid wit
nesses. The General Services Act, which provides the legal
authority for their retention, was passed by the Eighty-first
Congress very largely because it had the formidable endorse
ment of the Commission on the Organization of the Executive
Branch of Government, headed by Herbert Hoover. The Hoover
Commission had been distressed to learn that certain agencies of
the federal government very often had to forgo the advice of
eminent American specialists in such fields as science and educa
tion because they lacked any means for retaining them on a
part-time basis. The commission prepared a plan to enable
certain agencies to draw up and offer contracts retaining spe
cialists on a per-diem basis. It was accepted with enthusiasm by
the Congress.

An additional advantage of the scheme, it was thought, was
that it made it possible to obtain the services of qualified ad
visers without the delays and embarrassments caused by the
protracted rituals of loyalty and security checks. So far, the most
conspicuous use to which the law has been put is the hiring as
"expert consultants" of the former Communists and police agents
who make up the department's corps of professional witnesses.
And one of the most conspicuous uses to which the professional
witnesses are put is in establishing by sworn testimony that

j 2 j The Kept Witnesses

certain other employees of the government are loyalty and
security risks.

Thus, the key figures in the field o loyalty and security
clearance are men and women who are themselves almost alone
in the whole teeming structure of federal bureaucracy exempt
from the need for clearance. More than that, they compose a
group whose individual members would have almost no chance
of getting clearance if it were required of them. It reflects not at
all on their present condition of rectitude and probity to say that
their pasts reek of subversion and sedition and that a number of
them are convicted felons. One of the most prominent, for
example, Is Morris Malkin, formerly a union hoodlum and twice
convicted for felonious assault. Another Is Paul Crouch, gen
erally regarded as the professional witness with the most ex
perience and highest earnings, who was once court-martialed for
offenses against the Military Code of Justice, sentenced to forty
years of hard labor on Alcatraz Island, and dishonorably dis
charged from the Army. Fortunately relieved of any accountabil
ity for these aspects of their past, they play a crucial role in
determining who is and who is not of sufficient uprightness to
work for the United States government.

And as witnesses in other proceedings, the professionals play
a crucial role in determining many things. There Is, indeed,
no end to the number of places where they may turn up in the
course of their service to the Department of Justice and ap
parently in fulfillment of their agreement with it. While under
contract to the department, Matusow was a witness in depart
mental trials of a number of New York public-school teachers.
Paul Crouch, the dishonorably discharged buck private, filed
with Senator McCarthy's Committee on Government Operations
a bizarre memorandum describing a plot to subvert our entire
military establishment which he claims to have hatched with the
late Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Marshal of the Red Army, thirty
years ago. This bit of delayed Intelligence provided, according
to Roy M. Cohn, the impetus for the investigation of the Army
Signal Corps' radar laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey
a piece of work that uncovered not a single Communist but
did incalculable harm not only to government research but to

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT I22

the government's relationship with the whole scientific com
munity. Called by Congressmen hostile to the admission to
statehood of the Territory of Hawaii, Crouch took the oath
before the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and
deposed at length on Communism on the islands. William Gar-
field Cummings, one of the most ubiquitous of the breed, testified,
along with Mrs. Natvig and Lowell Watson, before the F.C.C. in
the Lamb case. In Louisville, Kentucky, an obscure journalist
was indicted for promoting civil disorder; to the good fortune
of the state attorney trying the case, there chanced to be on the
Department of Justice's list a Mrs. Alberta Ahearn, who was
prepared to say that she knew the defendant as a Communist.
Manning Johnson and Leonard Patterson, seasoned performers
on the Smith Act wheel, appeared as witnesses against Dr. Ralph
Bunche, of the United Nations Secretariat.

Because the government takes the view that its dealings with its
professional witnesses are privileged, it is impossible to take the
true measure of their influence. .But it is clear beyond all dispute
that one agency, the Department of Justice, is subsidizing testi
mony not only in many of the cases it is legitimately prosecuting
as the legal arm of the federal government but in a number of
other cases, some of them flagrantly political. Even the subsidy
it provides for witnesses in its -own prosecutions is a problem
serious enough to warrant investigation and examination.

It is a novel arrangement, this hiring of people to take a
solemn oath and testify favorably to ihe government. American
history offers no precedent for it. The use of paid informers
by police departments :and federal agencies such as Internal
Revenue is neither precedent nor .true parallel. The paid in
former's job is to aid the authorities in the uncovering of
crimes and the apprehension of criminals. He may sometimes.be
called as a witness, just as J:he paid witness may sometimes be
used as an informer, but generally speaking the functions are
separate, and the witness enters upon the scene only when the
work of the informer is done. It has long been recognized that
the maintenance of order in a society such as ours requires the
use of paid informers, but the professional witness up to now
has raacte an appearance only as the creature of disreputable

j2j The Kept Witnesses

law firms and private detective agencies and of certain businesses,
reputable except in this particular, which are frequently engaged
in litigation.

Up to now, he has not been associated with the United
States government. Circumstances may justify the association
today, but it nevertheless violates the spirit of our law and
jurisprudence. We do not ask witnesses to meet rigorous tests of
disinterestedness, as the Romans did, but we have always in
sisted that the giving of testimony is a bounden duty of citizen
ship, like the payment of taxes. It is expected that it will be
done freely and in good faith. When expectations fail, the law
steps in. The subpoena power exists to compel testimony. Our
courts are empowered to require witnesses to furnish bonds
under certain conditions, and witnesses may be jailed to assure
their appearance and prevent their being tampered with. Failure
to meet certain prescribed rules and standards may lead to
citations for contempt of court. It is recognized that the dis
charge of this responsibility of citizenship is in many ways
onerous and that it generally entails some financial sacrifice;
the courts, therefore, pay modest witness fees. But these, like
payments to jurors, are deliberately kept so low that they cannot
in any sense be regarded as rewards or even as just compensation.
Four dollars a day is the regular Department of Justice fee.

In certain cases, it is true, the courts tolerate payment by one
side or the other to witnesses who can provide highly specialized
knowledge. The general rule of law is that this may be done in
the case of men "upon whose observation and counsel, outside
the courtroom, society itself sets a price. Doctors, alienists, and
property appraisers are perhaps the most frequently encountered
types. These may be paid by principals in the case, provided the
fact of their payment is made known to the court and pro
vided there is no contingency basis for the agreement; the pay
ment of witnesses can under no circumstances be made to depend
upon the outcome of the case.

But even with these conditions the practice has always been
regarded as a dubious one, and jurors are allowed to give what
ever weight they choose to the fact that a witness testifying
before than is being paid for Ms version of the truth. "The ex-

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 124

perience of the ages/' Justice Chadwick o the Supreme Court of
the State of Washington once wrote, "sustains the legal con
clusion that where the truth is made to depend upon the
pecuniary interest of the witness ... his utterances wear a
cloak of suspicion, and they should not be accepted unless the
taint is removed by the testimony of credible witnesses or by
circumstances that cannot be denied/*

The cloak of suspicion is a garment that must be wrapped
several times around the witnesses for whose services the
Department of Justice has contracted. For one thing, their
pecuniary interest assuming, for the moment, that $34 a day
constitutes one has the unusual character of a continuum.
Ordinarily, where the possibility exists that the cupidity of a
witness, or even his simple exigency, will color his testimony and
thereby thwart justice, it exists only for a specific case at a
specific time. The experience of most men and women just is
not rich or varied enough to give them direct knowledge of
more than a few matters that may be subject to litigation during
their lives. But an accident of history puts the ex-Communist,
whether his faith was feigned or authentic, in possession of an
extraordinarily negotiable thing his past.

As Whittaker Chambers, who has given testimony but has
never become a professional and who has confronted the prob
lem of negotiable pasts with candor and deep insight, has
written, "He [the ex-Communist anti-Communist witness] risks
little. He sits in security and uses his special knowledge to
destroy others. He has that special information to give because
he knows those others' faces, voices, and lives, because he once
lived within their confidence. . . ."

Such an ex-Communist has acquired an expertise for which
the demand is, apparently, inexhaustible. His patron, the De
partment of Justice, seems to measure its usefulness by the
number of people it has jailed, by the number of deportations
it can claim, by the number of loyalty and security risks it can
process out of the government. It appears to be the department's
hope to prosecute the 30,000 or so American Communists one
by one; it recently got a start in this direction by convicting
one Claude Lightfoot in Chicago for violation of the Smith Act

J25 The Kept Witnesses

not as a leader of the Communist conspiracy, not as a teacher
of the doctrine of violent overthrow of the government, but as
a mere member of the conspiracy, a mere adherent of the doc
trine. With this conviction, which may well be justified by both
the law and the public interest, whole new horizons open up
for the department and Its witnesses.

What is wanted now, what is likely to be wanted more and
more in the immediate future, is Identifications identifications
in great numbers. Plainly enough, there could be rewards for
an elastic memory. The possibility exists, almost without end,
of the truth being made to depend on the pecuniary interest
of witnesses. Putting aside what may be the singular case of
Matusow, there have been, to date, no clear Instances of fraudu
lent identifications. But certain matters of record suggest the
nature of the lurking dangers.

Louis Budenz, a former editor of the Daily Worker, who has
testified that his income from all sources as an anti-Communist
witness and publicist has exceeded $10,000 a year, spent what
he maintains was 3,000 hours giving the names of Communists
to the F.B.I.

In none of those sessions, Budenz has conceded, did he offer
the name of John Carter Vincent or Owen Lattimore. But when
Senator McCarthy named both these men in various con
nections, all of them unfavorable, it came to Budenz, quite
certainly, that they were Communists. He so testified before
several Congressional committees and grand juries. Likewise,
Paul Crouch talked to the F.B.L on many occasions, testified in
numerous trials, and submitted to Congressional committees
the names of all Communists he had known aside from rank-
and-file members. Not once did he list a certain Jacob Burck, a
Chicago newspaper cartoonist. When, however, Burck was the
subject of a deportation hearing, Crouch testified that he had
encountered him often at meetings of the Central Committee
of the Communist party.

The memory is notoriously the most vagrant of human facul
ties, but there are few cases on record of a bent for mnemonic
topicality as powerful as that revealed by Paul Crouch. In some
instances, it is possible to rule out avarice altogether as an

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT I2 6

explanation for the weather changes his recall has undergone. In
a large number o documents that he prepared and read in
evidence before the Subversive Activities Control Board and a
number of Congressional committees, he recounted at length his
experiences in the Soviet Union during the period in which he
was preparing the campaign to subvert the American military
establishment. In these, he mentioned associations with Russian
leaders so numerous and so mighty in power as to expose himself
to reproaches for name-dropping. Up to 1953, there was one
name that did not turn up on any of the lists that of Georgi
Malenkov. In March of 1953, Malenkov succeeded to the
premiership of the Soviet state, and in March of 1953, Crouch,
filing the statement that led to the Fort Monmouth investigation
with the Committee on Government Operations, revealed for
the first time that the new Premier was among those with whom
he had conferred in 1927.

Crouch has acknowledged a weakness that may in his case
help explain such quirks. Before an Army court-martial in 1925,
he testified: "I am in the habit of writing letters to my friends
and imaginary persons, sometimes to kings and other foreign
persons, in which I place myself in an imaginary position. I
do that to develop my imaginary powers." In the Leviathan,
Hobbes wrote that * 'Imagination and memory are but one
thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names." No
free man's rights are put in jeopardy, no principle of law is
dishonored when Crouch either imagines or abruptly recalls
Georgi Malenkov as an old comrade-in-arms. But he has had
frequent lapses and recoveries involving persons who do qualify
for our law's protection. At the trial of Harry Bridges in 1949,
Crouch denied acquaintance with a Communist agitator named
David Davis. "I have never heard of David Davis," he told the
court. "I had no knowledge of David Davis." By 1951, however,
he had not only heard of David Davis, he had encountered him
as early as 1928. He was examined by a federal judge about a
Communist meeting allegedly held in 1928:

Q. Was Mr. Davis present?
A. Yes, your honor.

I2 j The Kept Witnesses

On May 6, 1949, Crouch testified before the House Com
mittee on Un-American Activities and was asked if he knew a
man named Armand Scala, an officer of Miami Local 500 of
the Transport Workers Union;

A. Very well, with Local 500.
Q. Is he a member of the Communist party?

A. I do not know. ... I do not know of my own knowledge what
Ms party affiliations are.

But on May 11, five days later, Crouch put into the record
of the committee a statement and several affidavits amplifying
his earlier testimony. In one, he said: "Another member and
officer of Local 500 I knew to be active in Communist work in
Miami is Armand Scala. Scala had been the chief Communist
courier to Latin American countries." In an article published
in the Hearst newspapers a few days after that, he made an even
more explicit identification of Scala as "the chief courier of the
party in Latin America . , . traveling to Buenos Aires and Rio
de Janeiro frequently on party business/' In a subsequent libel
suit, he swore to the truth of these assertions. Since the news
paper stories had not been privileged, Scala was awarded $5,000.

It may well be that Crouch was, as he presently insists, testi
fying to the best of his recollection on each specific occasion.
No more can be asked of anyone. But the fact cannot be blinked
that the use of subsidized testimony increases the danger of sub
sidized perjury. The rule of law against contingent fees is not
directly violated by the contractual agreements the Department
of Justice has with Crouch and other witnesses. These agreements
are signed, sealed, and delivered in advance of testimony some
times very far in advance. A witness named Daisy Van Dorn has
testified that she received $125 a month for two years simply
to hold herself ready to take the witness stand. However, the
clear moral principle upon which the rule of contingency rests
is abused by the practice.

The department's list of the names and earnings of the "per
sons regularly used as witnesses" shows wide variation in income
among the professionals. An element of contingency accounts
for the variations. A witness gets his fee whether the case is

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 128

settled favorably or unfavorably for the government, but common
sense and even the solicitousness for the taxpayer of which
the government boasts must suggest that the witness who can
assist in the production of the greatest number of convictions
is the witness who should get the most work. In the Department
of Justice as, for that matter, in most lesser prosecuting agencies
throughout the country success is quantitatively measured. It
has been customary in this country to take what steps we can
to prevent the quantitative measurement of truth. The use of
professional witnesses, though it may be warranted by many
present needs, should at least be recognized as a step in the
other direction.

Justice Ghadwick's cloak of suspicion is becoming to the pro
fessional witness for reasons other than those of pecuniary in
terest. If a heavy risk is run of his memory being stimulated by
the prospect of increased emoluments, there is an equally heavy
risk that he will visit, not the truth as he knows it, but the fury
of disenchantment as he feels it on those against whom he
testifies. There is no way of being certain of how many of the
professional witnesses are genuine apostates and how many are
merely former police agents.

(It is F.B.I. policy never to confirm or deny an individual's
statement regarding instructions he claims to have had from the
Bureau, and this has led to a certain amount of confusion.
Matthew Cvetic told the House Un-American Activities Com
mittee that George Dietz and Joseph Mazzei were members of
the Communist party in Pittsburgh. Dietz and Mazzei, fired from
their jobs, indignantly declared that they, too, were F.B.I, agents
and had in fact been reporting to the Bureau on Cvetic's
numerous subversive connections. Similarly, doubts were cast on
the bona fides of William Garfield Cummings as an F.B.I, agent
when it was revealed that his membership in the Communist
party antedated his recruitment by the Bureau and that he
encouraged continued service to the party by friends and rela
tives after he left it.)

In any event, a considerable number of the professional wit
nesses are disaffected Communists and clearly carry the stigmata
and disabilities, along with the special insights, of their kind.

I2 g The Kept Witnesses

Many of them display what may be regarded as a touching
eagerness to serve the society they once sought to destroy; in
some of their cases, this laudable sentiment Is fused with what
may more reasonably be described as a thirst for revenge. Men's
defects are often only the flaws In their virtue; the flaw may
render the virtue nugatory. Manning Johnson, once an ardent
Communist and more recently an ardent patriot, testified before
the Subversive Activities Control Board that It is an article of
his present faith that some things are more Important than
truth:

Q. In other words, you will tell a lie under oath In a court of law
rather than run counter to your instructions from the FBI. Is
that right?

A. If the interests of my government are at stake. In the face of
enemies, at home and abroad, if maintaining secrecy of the
techniques of methods of operation of the FBI who have responsi
bility for the protection of our people, I say I will do it a thousand
times.

Again Manning Johnson, this time in a sedition trial in Penn
sylvania and undergoing examination on his testimony in a
deportation proceeding that had taken place earlier:

Q. That testimony was not correct, was it, Mr. Johnson?
A. No, it wasn't, precisely, because I could not at that time reveal
that I had supplied Information to the FBI. ... I think the
security of the government has priority over . . . any other con
sideration.

The fear of systems of priorities such as Mr. Johnson's has
given rise to the legal doctrine of testis unus, testis nullus
one witness is no witness. But a difficulty raised by the Justice
Department's use of professionals, and by its policy of with
holding Information about it, is that two or more witnesses may
share this view, or a similar one. We do not know how many
people have been convicted, deported, and discharged from
government service on evidence supplied wholly by kept wit
nesses.

Throughout the history of societies living, or trying to live,
under the rule of law, the role of the witness has been a vexatious

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT

130

problem for judges, lawyers, and all others who have concerned
themselves with it. Broadly speaking, the tendency In most
Western nations has been a steady easing of restrictions. When
systems of law are young, jurists cling to the hope that truth
will be received only from undefiled sources. This is sooner or
later found to be an impossible aspiration, and in some respects
a false one, though it is unquestionably noble in spirit. The
judicial process, to be sure, must always be, or should always
be, a relentless search for the truth. But we know from long
experience that the truth is often found in the unlikeliest places.
The fact that a Manning Johnson hates and fears Communists,
feels betrayed by them, and regards every living one of them as
a menace to the whole of humanity does not mean that he is
incapable of ever telling the truth about them. What it does
mean is that he may possibly tell something other than the
truth and that those who use him as a source of information
must be vigilant against the possibility of receiving misinforma
tion.

It is doubtless necessary to use the Manning Johnsons of this
world. Society has little choice in the matter. As police and
prosecuting officials like to point out when they are rebuked
for their use of low, untrustworthy characters as informers and
witnesses it is very seldom possible to find bishops and cardinals
who are widely acquainted among felons and well-informed on
the workings of vice syndicates, counterfeiting gangs, dope
peddlers, smuggling rings, and the like. Society, through its law-
enforcement agencies, must deal with these aspects of itself, and
it cannot afford to scorn information about them that comes
from persons it regards with distaste and does not entirely trust
even from persons deeply implicated in the crimes under re
view. Though it would be agreeable to adhere to the view of
Lord Langdale, who ruled in a famous nineteenth-century judg
ment, that "a witness has no business to concern himself with
the merits of the case in which he is called," we must realize
that in many cases no such witness exists,

Because truth often turns up where it is the least expected,
and because we have a steady need of truth from whatever source,
w hav progressively reduced the number of factors disqualifying

j^j The Kept Witnesses

witnesses and progressively increased our reliance on the power
of the witness's oath, the perjury laws, and cross-examination.
Up to now, though, we have not accommodated ourselves to the
Idea o witnesses who make a business of being witnesses. It
may be that the time has come when we must do so. It may be
that internal security is our overriding need and that we must
accept this device for coping with it. But If this Is the case, It
would seem as if the problem ought to be squarely faced. The
Department of Justice should, in that event, abandon its present
furtiveness and give a full public accounting of the terms and
conditions upon which it purchases testimony. It should recog
nize, as Justice Holmes did in his weighing of the merits of
wire tapping, that the government is caught in a conflict of
competing "objects of desire" the desire to catch criminals and
the desire to maintain governmental Integrity. ("We have to
choose," Holmes said, "and for my part I think It less evil that
some criminals should escape than that the government should
play an Ignoble part.") There may be an equitable and decent
way of resolving the conflict, bat no conflict can be resolved
without first acknowledging that It exists.

In any "serious weighing of the issues, it would be necessary,
also, to recognize that more Is at stake than justice to individuals.
That is, of course, the largest question of all in any free and
open society. But it is not the only one. When the federal
government subsidizes a group such as its present corps of pro
fessional witnesses, it finds itself, willy-nilly, subsidizing a special
political interest. Many of the larger categories of cases tried
under federal law involve political principles, political ideas,
political organizations. The Communist cases manifestly do, and
not the least of the effects of the government's policy has been
to give those professional witnesses who are also professional
politicians and ideologues an opportunity to exert a considerable
Influence on public opinion and public policy in matters on
which they have a special, if not an eccentric, outlook.

It should not strain credulity to suggest that if there has been
prevalent in recent years a somewhat distorted view of the
dimensions of the problem of domestic Communism the fault

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 132

can in large part be charged to the account of the Department
of Justice and its professional witnesses.

No man, for example, has had any greater influence on the
public view of the Communist problem than Louis F. Budenz.
On the basis of his reputation as the government's leading wit
ness in Smith Act cases and before Congressional committees,
he has established an almost universal acceptance of himself as
a high authority and of his books, articles, lectures, and tele
vision discourses as bearing some imagined seal of official ap
proval. Elizabeth Bentley, J. B. Matthews, Benjamin Gitlow,
Howard Rushmore, and Joseph Kornfeder run not very far be
hind. (Whittaker Chambers has also been enormously influential,
but of him it must be said that his writings lend more authority
to his testimony than his testimony lends to his writings. He is
not, therefore, of this company.)

Lesser witnesses have established lesser reputations on the
strength of their endorsement by the government. Moreover,
they have had and are having a direct influence on policy and
law not through appeals to public opinion but through direct
appeals to the governing powers. Paul Crouch tells the Senate
what to do about Hawaii and how the Army should be run.
Matthew Cvetic is called by the Senate Rules Committee to
advise on the thorny question of rules for Congressional in
vestigations. Maurice Malkin, the ex-convict, himself eligible for
deportation and denaturalization, is called before the Senate
Subcommittee on Naturalization and Immigration to make rec
ommendations. (He thought there were too many avenues of
appeal. He said that once it is proved that anyone is a member
"of a certain organization, he should be deported without
further hearings of any sort.") Almost the entire membership
of the department corps was summoned before the Internal
Security Subcommittee to help produce the enormous and enor
mously influential report "Interlocking Subversion in Govern
ment Departments" a document that more perhaps than any
other has formed the prevailing image of Communist infiltration
in the nineteen-thirties and forties. The kept witnesses have been
given an opportunity to foul American due process and quite
a bit else besides.

* At a Baize-Covered Table on the

Isle of Rhodes

1958

ONE OF THESE DAYS, perhaps, some gifted historian will undertake
to explain how and why it was that the early autumn of this year
turned out to be a period of upheaval and unrest in most of the
countries that have asserted national sovereignty since the end
of the last war. In Asia, three of them gave up temporarily, at
least the struggle to maintain free institutions and passed into
military dictatorship. The President of Pakistan, a soldier named
Iskander Mirza, said he had come to the conclusion that democ
racy couldn't work in a country where eighty-four per cent of
the people were illiterate; he therefore abolished democracy. He
suspended the constitution, dissolved the Parliament and the"
Provincial Assemblies (in one of them, the Deputy Speaker was
recently killed by flying microphones, desk tops, inkpots, and
other artifacts of parliamentary government, in the midst of a
brawl on the floor), outlawed all parties, arrested many poli
ticians, and turned the state power over to General Mohammed
Ayub Khan, the head of the Army. In Burma, the Premier, U Nu,
a gentle Buddhist philosopher and the Burmese translator of
Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, said
that the chaos and corruption in the country were more than he
could cope with; he put the Army in charge and made arrange
ments to turn his own job over to General Ne Win, the com
mander in chief of the Burmese defense forces. In Thailand,
where the military had several times seized power in the last few

133

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT I34

years but where the constitution had remained in force, Field
Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who had just returned home after spend
ing almost a year in London and New York undergoing treat
ment for cirrhosis of the liver, took over the government and
junked the constitution justifying his action by citing the need
to "build a stronger bulwark against Communism and to drive
Communist elements from the country." While the lights were
going out through much of Asia, a small one was turned back on
in Ceylon, whose Prime Minister, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, volun
tarily relinquished certain powers of censorship, arrest, and seiz
ure that had been granted him some time back to deal with racial
disturbances. But the Prime Minister himself was not sanguine
about the future of democracy in Ceylon or elsewhere in the
Orient. "I have always had doubts whether the system is quite
suitable to some of our countries," he said. In Iraq, where a
bloody palace revolution took place last July, there was an at
tempt at another one, and the government of Lebanon, which
had received protection from the United States Marines after the
Iraqi revolution, came very close to collapse. In Indonesia,
Ghana, and Tunisia, where the rulers are eloquent in their pro
fessions of democratic and liberal sentiments, severe repressive
measures were taken against critics and opponents of the regimes.
The Jakarta authorities decreed that henceforth no one could
start a newspaper without the approval of the Jakarta military
command. Kwame Nkrumah, the Prime Minister of Ghana and
a man often described as an African Thomas Jefferson, banned
public meetings of the opposition party, on the ground that such
meetings "might provoke ill-disposed persons to indulge in
breaches of the peace." In Tunisia, President Habib Bourguiba,
another leader widely admired as an evangel of a free society, had
the leading opposition paper put out of business. (The paper had
accused Bourguiba of holding a political trial of a former Pre
mier, who had been charged with "treason" because he helped
the old Bey of Tunis flee the country with all his jewels.) "Free
dom is dangerous," Bourguiba said. "The state and its existence
are essential before everything else. All this preoccupation with
liberty is not serious. ... I am creating a nation."
While some of these melancholy developments were being an-

J35 ^ a Baize-Covered Table on the Isle of Rhodes

nounced and others were In the making, I had the luck to find
myself on the Isle of Rhodes, in the eastern Mediterranean, at
tending a series of discussions by informed and eminent persons
the majority of them public officials or leaders of opinion
from the countries that were the scene of so much turbulence.
These discussions, which were officially and ponderously called
"An International Seminar: Representative Government and
Public Liberties in the New States/' were planned and managed
by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a worthy organization,
anti-Communist and generally libertarian in outlook and asso
ciated with no government, that has its headquarters in Paris.
Some forty people, mostly from the so-called new states but in
cluding a few from democracies that have been In more or less
successful operation for a longer time, talked together, or made
speeches at one another, for a week and a day in the Hotel des
Roses, a seaside resort built by the Italians during their occupa
tion of Rhodes before World War II and now mainly patronized
by prosperous German vacationers. The costs of the gathering
were met by the Ford Foundation, itself a new and awesome
sovereignty In the world*

The seminar was organized back in the spring, when it could
hardly have been guessed that the talk would be punctuated by
bulletins that would seem to make a good deal of what was being
said academic. (The announcement that the Army had taken
over in Pakistan came only a few hours after a Pakistani told the
gathering how fortunate his country was In having an Army
whose officers hadn't the slightest interest In politics.) But the
organizers knew well enough that the new states were having
their troubles as well as their triumphs, and that these troubles
were being shared, willy-nilly, with the old states. (The term
"new states," incidentally, satisfied no one, and the Persians,
Siamese, and Egyptians who were cast as representatives of "new"
sovereignties could hardly have been more uneasy than the "old"
Americans, cast as avuncular, ripe-with-experience types.) And
they knew, too, that if present trends continue through the next
ten or fifteen years, there will be an even greater proliferation of
sovereignties than occurred in the last ten or fifteen. By 1970 or
thereabouts, Africa could easily have more representatives in

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT i 3 6

the United Nations than the entire Western Hemisphere, and
Asian irredentism could just about double the number of nations
on that continent. The Cultural Freedom people thought, in
good Western fashion, that it might be helpful if some of the
formidable intellects from the present new states were seated,
along with a few from the older states, at a baize-covered table,
provided with a moderator and an agenda, and given eight days
in which to talk.

Rhodes, which lies only fourteen miles off the coast of Turkey
and affords a magnificent view of the coastal ranges of the Ana
tolian Mountains, was chosen as the site for the seminar partly
because it is more or less conveniently situated for the new states
and partly because it is an agreeable place to be in mid-October.
The fact that it was allied, a few millenniums back, to the
Athenian democracy was no doubt an extra inducement, even
though the government that now has Athens as its capital and
Rhodes as its easternmost province is not a particularly shining
example of either representative government or public rights.
Midway in the seminar, the Athens radio and newspapers
brought the participants the news that two Greek editors had
been clapped into jail for the novel offense of "misinterpreting"
a newspaper article by Joseph Alsop. However, this did not pre
vent innumerable allusions to the glory that was Greece, the
grandeur that was Rhodes, and the great charm that the Platonic
ideal of philosopher-kings held for a group of political intellec
tuals.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom is more interested in
philosophers than in kings, and in the Western nations it is easy
to tell one class from the other; indeed, it is almost impossible
to confuse the two. In Western Europe, intellectuals may find
their way into government a trifle more often than they do in
this country, but, by and large, the rule in the West is that intel
lectuals and politicians stay out of each other's way. Of the fifteen
or so Europeans and Americans at Rhodes, only four had any
official connections. These were the Right Honourable John
Strachey, M.P., a son of Bloomsbury who has a Labour con
stituency in Dundee and was Secretary of State for War under
Clement Attlee; Frode Jacobsen, a member of the Danish Par-

137 dt a Baize-Covered Table on the Isle of Rhodes

llament and a sometime Cabinet Minister; Judge Charles Wy-
zanski, Jr., of the Federal District Court In Massachusetts; and
Gunnar Myrdal, the famous Swedish economist and sociologist
(and the author of what Is often said to be the most comprehen
sive study ever made of race relations in the United States), who
has now and then worked for his own government and for the
United Nations, and whose wife Is at present the Swedish Ambas
sador to India. There were four other Americans, three French
men, and one Italian (the novelist Ignazio Silone), none of
whom held either appointive or elective office, and none of
whom, as far as was known, had political aspirations,

In most of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, though, things
are very different; scratch an intellectual In those parts of the
world and the chances are better than even that you will find a
politician possibly a President or Prime Minister, almost cer
tainly a member of, or candidate for, Parliament. There are at
least two good reasons for this. One is that the independence
movements have been mostly led by Intellectuals, who thus find
themselves on the ground floor when nationhood is achieved
as men like Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and the Adamses did
in the early days here. The other is that illiteracy Is so widespread
In most of the areas that have become or are about to become
self-governing that any man of any education has to be pressed
into service pro bono publico. In fact, the scarcity of competence
is so great that a good many new states have had to hire foreign
ers to get things going for them. For Instance, one participant
in the Rhodes seminar, a seminarist from Tunisia, was Cecil
Hourani, a man of Lebanese-Arab ancestry who was born in
Manchester, was formerly an Oxford don, and at present plays
a Harry Hopkins-Sherman Adams role for President Bourguiba.
The Israeli intellectual was the journalist Moshe Sharett, a
former Foreign Minister and Prime Minister, and at present
a member of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, while the man
from the United Arab Republic was Ibharim Abdel Rahman,
an astrophysicist who serves President Nasser as secretary-general
of the National Planning Commission in Cairo. (After the open
ing session, neither of these showed up when the other was
present.)

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT 138

The people invited to the seminar were chosen not for their
political attainments but for their presumed ability to participate
in a free and rational discussion of the state of democracy and
liberty in the countries they came from. But in the new states the
men who have the intellectual equipment for such a discussion
almost invariably turn out to be either running the show or
hoping to run it soon. It was largely on this account, I think,
that the seminar failed to provide anything very striking in the
way of polemics. One thing it did provide was evidence that the
doubling in brass of the intellectuals itself constitutes one of the
major problems for the new states. The Westerners, lacking
political responsibilities and political hopes, could speak with
detachment of the societies they represented; only a few of the
non-Westerners could do so. This first came to light when an
Indian, politician with an iconoclastic turn of mind Minocher R.
Marsani, a former mayor of Bombay and a member of the
Indian Parliament who is among the sharpest of Mr. Nehru's
critics said that in the course of a visit to Brazil a few years ago
he learned that the Brazilians had established literacy require
ments for the exercise of suffrage; the thought had then crossed
his mind, he said, that his own country might have given some
thought to this possibility when its constitution was drawn up
in 1949. Mr. Marsani did not say that he opposed universal
suffrage; he said merely that he had been struck by the fact that
the idea of limiting the franchise to people who could read and
write had never even been examined by the founding fathers of
Indian democracy. The effect of these observations on his com
patriots and on certain other Asian and African politicians was
roughly comparable to the one that might be produced in the
Congress of the United States if someone took the floor to recom
mend that all members of the American Legion, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.,
Rotary International, the League of Women Voters, the National
Grange, and the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian Churches
should be stripped of the rights of citizenship. Illiterates constitute
about eighty-five per cent of the population of India, and are thus
an enfranchised bloc a good deal larger than the combined mem
bership of these respectable American organizations. One after an
other, the highly literate Indian participants, reinforced by allies

*39 At a Baize-Covered Table on the Isle of Rhodes

from other countries where illiteracy is widespread, rose to de
nounce Mr. Marsani's heresy and explain what splendid citizens,
what wise electors, what shrewd judges of character, what incor
ruptible spirits the illiterate peasantry were. The speakers were not
content to point out that there could be educated boobs and men
of unlettered wisdom; they were trying to suggest that it was un
fair and undemocratic to make any correlation between judgment
and knowledge, and they carried this so far that an impression
able observer might have drawn the conclusion that a convoca
tion of some of the world's most highly trained intellects was
advancing the argument that illiteracy was a blessed state indeed,
and that the world would be better off if only it were more wide
spread. Some unimpressionable onlookers drew the conclusion
that few democratic politicians, Eastern or Western, highbrow or
lowbrow, from new states or old, will ever allow themselves to be
put in the position of questioning the virtues of any sizable bloc
of voters certainly not a bloc that is eighty-five per cent of the
whole and about 325 million in number.

At Rhodes, moments of candor and self-criticism were rare, and
most of them were provided by Westerners. Robert M. Hutchins,
the former president of the University of Chicago and now the
president of the Fund for the Republic, drew a portrait of
American society not "with warts and everything," as Cromwell
wished to be drawn, but with warts and almost nothing else, and
in a brief talk on political parties Ignazio Silone seemed to be
saying that in the West and, l>y implication, everywhere that
Western practices are followed all mass parties must come to
approximately the same bad end as the monolithic, doctrinaire,
intellectually corrupt Communists. It was not that the men from
the new states were complacent about the way things were going
back home; it was, instead, that they preferred to dwell on the
obstacles placed in their way by such large, unmanageable forces
as history, tradition, and the uneven distribution of natural
bounties rather than to discuss difficult but conceivably assailable
problems like the scarcity of educated men and women, and the
need that democratic societies had for the kind of critical and
analytical minds that were so obviously in short supply even at
this select gathering, Edward A. Shils, an American sociologist

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT

140

who acted as chairman of the seminar for most of its meetings,
wrote a brilliant paper on this very subject, which was circulated
to the participants a paper arguing that democracy and public
liberties can hardly exist unless there are, outside the state appa
ratus, a number of people dedicated to the job of examining
and appraising the workings of the apparatus. The argument
aroused little interest or sympathy; in fact, a session devoted to
discussing it was sidetracked by an impromptu and interminable
exposition of Islamic polity by a learned Lebanese who lectures
on such matters at Oxford the brother, as it happens, of the
Lebanese who is the strong right arm of the President of Tunisia.
(Oxford was a great presence at the seminar; it had sons on hand
from many countries, and they made as distinct a fraternity,
socially and intellectually, as the Americans, the French, or the
Indians.)

A few non-Westerners attempted hard analysis and criticism,
but they met with little success in inducing others to undertake
this exercise. The most notable attempt was made by a Siamese
named Kukrit Pramoj, a Bangkok publisher and a prince of the
ruling house, who had barely managed to make the seminar,
having been acquitted only a few days before of charges of sedi
tion and libel over some unflattering observations about the
American Ambassador. Prince Pramoj, an old Oxonian himself,
was a worldling beside whom most of the other participants
seemed like so many Dr. Panglosses. He delivered himself of some
home thoughts from abroad, whose tenor was that democracy
(an ideal he respected as much as anyone else at the meeting) had
in his country just about succeeded in wiping out public liberties
such as free speech and a free press that had been fairly secure
under an absolute monarch; in fact, it had merely led to the
replacement of one absolute monarch by two hundred of them.
Representative government, he said, could have little meaning
in a country whose people had not accepted or had not grasped
the idea of a conflict of economic interests or of a conflict be
tween private and public interests. There are, he said, about
thirty parties in Thailand, practically all of them co-operatives
or benevolent associations for politicians. He pointed out that
Thailand's situation is a bit different from that of the former

J^r At a Baize-Covered Table on the Isle of Rhodes

colonies. Illiteracy is not above thirty-five per cent, which means
that there are a good many people qualified by schooling, if not
by devotion to the general welfare, for political jobs. And just
about everyone wants a political job, he declared; the arrival of
democratic politics in Thailand was like the arrival of television
or air-conditioning in an industrialized country it opened up
an entirely new field for employment and money-making. Since
the politics were mostly concerned with nothing political (there
simply can't be thirty different approaches to the problems of
Thailand), they turned out to be mostly about money-making.
Representative government, he said, had developed into organ
ized corruption, and when public liberties got in the way of this
important enterprise as when someone risked giving offense to
the American Ambassador the tendency of the state was to
deny them.

At the conclusion of his talk, Prince Framoj, who had mani
fested a great impatience with the oratory and pedantry that
characterized much of the seminar, threw out a challenge to the
other participants from the new states to put aside hopes and
distant prospects for the moment and describe, as factually as
they could, the present condition of democracy and freedom in
their countries. He said that this would redeem for him the long
trip to Rhodes and the long days of sitting in a hotel ballroom
listening to talk. He was roundly applauded, but no one rose to
accept his challenge, and the discussion quickly soared back to
the high level of theory and historical perspective from which
he had dragged it down. (Later in the seminar, a newly arrived
Burmese lawyer and journalist, Dr. Maung Maung, spoke in the
same spirit as Prince Pramoj, but not in response to his chal
lenge.) At the instance of Mr. Strachey, the left end of the Oxford
team, a good deal of time and huge stores of heavy irony were
spent in pursuit of the question of whether there existed in the
new states the "class struggle" that Mr. Strachey (though no
longer as pure a Marxist as he was twenty years ago) still regards
as the first fact of life in the old states. Now and then, there were
promising starts at discussing how far essentially European insti
tutions, such as common law, could or should be adapted to
non-European cultures. There was always someone ready to

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT r 4 2

remind the Europeans and Americans that their ideas of right
and wrong and good and bad were not the only ones in the
world of men, but there was very seldom anyone who could be
specific in making distinctions. At one point, a noted specialist
in African affairs said flatly that much of Negro Africa found
the system of law introduced by the British repugnant to the
local perceptions of reality. M. Raymond Aron, the distinguished
columnist of Le Figaro, of Paris, and a man who made a large
contribution to the seminar by repeatedly asking "How?" and
"Why?" and "Where?" and "When?/* said that this piqued his
curiosity; he wished to be set straight on exactly what percep
tions the man was talking about. The specialist said that it wasn't
easy to think of an example just then, but that one would surely
come to him. In a moment, one did: An African villager who
discovers that the tracks of a missing domestic animal lead
directly to the pen of a neighbor, he said, cannot follow the prin
ciple of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that holds a man innocent
until he is proved guilty; he will assume the neighbor's guilt,
leaving it up to the suspect to prove his innocence. One had the
feeling that if the difference between cultures went only this far
that if African villagers held roughly the same view of things
as Wyoming ranchers then one man's meat would be another
man's meat, Anglo-Saxon democracy would be a universal value,
and life would be quite simple; on the other hand, however, one
had the stronger feeling that life was not this simple, that the
example did not exemplify but showed, perhaps, only the diffi
culty of putting profound differences into words at an interna
tional conference paid for by the Ford Foundation, and that
possibly the very notion of trying to get at the truth by seating a
lot of people around a table in a first-class hotel was culture-
bound and foolish.

Yet the worldling Prince Pramoj did not succumb to such
doubts. Twice more he challenged the seminar to deal with con
crete problems. Once, after a lush bit of rhetoric by a French
West African named Thomas Diop on European and American
inhumanity to the darker-skinned peoples of the earth, he said
that his "boredom would be relieved" if he could receive an
encouraging report on the steps being taken to eliminate class

14$ At a Baize-Covered Table on the Isle of Rhodes

and caste and color distinctions in the parts of the world not
dominated by Europeans and Americans. And on another occa
sion he raised the question of whether certain groups of people
that had achieved, or were soon to achieve, nationhood were not
too small and too poor for so difficult and costly an undertaking.
Africa, he said, seems well on its way toward being cut up into a
host of nations (many of them no larger in population and, in
some cases, in size than Connecticut or New Jersey), with each,
unless fashions change greatly or history stops repeating itself,
striving to maintain an army, a navy, an air force, foreign em
bassies, and, in time, no doubt, an atomic-energy establishment.
Does it all make sense, he asked. No one answered him directly,
but an answer emerged: Sense or no sense, this is what the people
seem to want. A Nigerian spokesman, after hearing Moshe
Sharett proudly describe the way the Israelis had used their
army as an educational institution, said that this was exactly
what his countrymen planned to do after 1960, when they would
achieve independence. The armed forces, he said, would not be
a bunch of idlers; when the troops were not defending the father
land, they would be learning to read and write and operate lathes
and drive tractors and repair sewing machines, and so forth. At
this point, someone propounded an extraordinary question:
Would it be necessary for Nigeria to have armed forces? The
spokesman Mr. Ayo Ogunsheye, director of the department of
extramural studies at University College, Ibadan, and one of the
most interesting speakers at the seminar said that of course
the country would need armed forces. What for? To protect the
frontiers. But Nigeria will be completely surrounded by French
colonies and a United Nations trust territory; is France likely to
attempt to subdue an independent Nigeria in the world of 1960?
Probably not, Mr. Ogunsheye said, but, after all, an army is an
attribute of nationhood; every nation has one. Not Costa Rica,
it was pointed out. Mr. Ogunsheye was unmoved. The Tunisian
Mr. Hourani came to Ms aid. He remarked that an army needn't
be such a great expense, because it isn't really necessary to arm
every soldier. The Tunisians, he explained, have a fine army with
only one rifle for every four riflemen- Professor John Kenneth
Galbraith, of Harvard* rose to suggest that in time the new

MATTERS MAINLY OF FACT j 44

African states would prove themselves capable of cultivating the
tensions and hostilities that Europe had so brilliantly achieved
and that made the maintenance o armies seem so worth while.
Mr. Louis Fischer, an American journalist who has made some
thing of a specialty of the new states, said that he found Mr.
Ogunsheye's attitude entirely understandable. "A gentleman
needs a necktie/' Mr. Fischer said.

The seminar touched only lightly on the questions that seemed
from what may be the narrow and parochial point of view
that came naturally to at least one American to be the most
important ones for the new states. The new states are mostly in
what we used to called "backward regions" and now call "under
developed areas" though for several, particularly in the Middle
East, "overdeveloped" might be a more accurate term. They are
poor, and at the present time their prospects for riches are not
great. The United States, in contrast, had a virgin continent to
develop, and there are parts of it that remain virgin to this day,
thousands of years after much of North Africa and Asia was
agriculturally, at any rate worked almost to death. The United
States is only now feeling the first faint tremors of the population
explosion that is rocking many of the new and burgeoning
sovereignties; while we have the technology to cope with it for
a century or two, at least, there are grounds for suspecting that it
is already beyond control in certain parts of the world. We
achieved national unity (though not without a hideous war
that, if it had been fought with modern weapons, might have
destroyed us altogether) because we had plenty of time in which
to assimilate aliens and teach them our language, and because
the aliens were persuaded to come to us by their admiration for
what we were doing. This nation grew organically; the majority
of the new states achieved mere growth long ago, far in advance
of nationhood, and in most cases they now seek to achieve unity
within boundaries that were never intended to be national ones
but were merely drawn to mark off the outer limits of some Eu
ropean empire's power or interest. Many of the new states even
the minuscule ones lack so much as a common tongue. If the
characteristics of a nation are common loyalties and a common
language, then India, which, of the lot, appears to have the most

*45 At a Baize-Covered Table on the Isle of Rhodes

representative government and the widest public liberties, should
be not one nation but a dozen and, in the opinion of some
authorities, it may be, one sad day. In the continental United
States, there have never been very many people who, if asked what
temporal authority their loyalties were pledged to, would answer
anything but "the United States." In India, on the myriad islands
of Indonesia, in nomad Iraq, and even in little Ghana, there are
vast numbers of people who have little awareness if they have
any at all of the fact that they are nationals of the recognized
governments of those territories. The United States had a hun
dred years in which it ignored and was largely ignored by the rest
of the world; the new states are under enormous pressures, both
Communist and anti-Communist, to take part in the world strug
gle for power.

It could only be hoped that one American's view of the pros
pects of the new states was as myopic as some of the people at
the seminar must have thought it, and that American experience
was not as relevant as it seemed.

PART THREE

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND
HOSTILITIES

Holmes, J., Sage

1958

"IN COMPRESSION OF STATEMENT/' Stlmson Bullltt has written
of Mr. Justice Holmes, "he was a rival of Tacitus and an equal of
Bacon." He was In any case a splendid writer as accomplished
a stylist, at least in the narrow sense, as this country has produced.
There Is a liveliness and tension and rub about the briefest of
Holmes* letters and the least controversial of his opinions from
the bench. He never spoke or wrote except crisply. He never
committed a soggy sentence.

Holmes may not endure the centuries as Tacitus has, or Bacon.
One certain fact, though, Is that he lived in that state of grace
we call maturity as long as any man In history. Holmes, who
knew John Qulncy Adams and Alger Hiss, was intellectually
adult in adolescence, and he reached his middle nineties without
being overtaken by senility. Aged nineteen, in the summer before
Lincoln's election, he wrote a Harvard theme on Albrecht Diirer
that only recently was cited by Wolfgang Stechow, an eminent
German critic, as making Ruskin's essay on Diirer sound hazy,
hasty, and trivial by comparison. Three-quarters of a century
later, Holmes was cracking jokes with Harold Laski and advising
him that Franklin Roosevelt was "a good fellow with rather a
soft edge"; urging the soft-edged one to "form your battalions
and fight"; shooting off prickly commentaries on current cases
to his friend Sir Frederick Pollock; gossiping with Walter
Lippmann; eying Washington flappers through his Georgetown
window; reading Ernest Hemingway; and talking on the radio.
George Bernard Shaw started as early as Holmes and ended as
late and was flashier all the way, but In most things Shaw lacked

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES J 5 o

Holmes' finish and judgment. ("He seems to me/* Holmes said,
"to dogmatize in an ill-bred way on his personal likes and
dislikes. Of course I delight in his wit.") "Maturity" was never
the word for Shaw, but it was for Holmes, who had no flibber
tigibbet stages, though he was sometimes undone by flipness, a
quite different thing. It took him forty years to appreciate
Lincoln. "Few men in baggy trousers and bad hats are recognized
as great by those who see them/' he had explained, lamely, to a
lady in 1909. He early decided that most liberals and radicals
"drooled," so he not only withheld his sympathy but missed most
of what they had to say. But though he may have often been
wrong, he was never stupid and never foolish. And never, above
all, banal. No platitude was ever known to cross his lips.

Holmes was a sage probably the truest one this country has
produced. The term seems to have occurred to everyone who has
written of him. "A sage with the bearing of a cavalier/* Walter
Lippmann said. "He wears wisdom like a gorgeous plume." A
sage is a man, generally old, who wears wisdom, but the wisdom
need not be particularly original, though it should always seem
to be fresh. Holmes was more original in expression than in
thought. He was not a philosopher in any creative sense. He
was more to use a distinction of his own, but not one that he
applied to himself "a retail dealer in notions" than "the
originator of large ideas." He belongs, I think, with Montaigne,
Dr. Johnson, and all the great apostles of common sense. Someone
has said that his was the profoundest intellect that ever dispensed
Anglo-Saxon justice, and this may well be so, but his gift was for
criticism and elucidation, not for invention and construction. It
is not clear that he ever acknowledged this, and certainly he
wished it to be otherwise. He hungered shamelessly for im
mortality in the sense of remembrance beyond the grave. He had
high hopes that the "little fragments of my fleece that I have left
upon the hedges of life" would not be blown away. He spoke of
anticipating "the subtle rapture of a postponed power" and he
said that "no man has earned the right to intellectual ambition
until he has learned to lay his course by a star which he has never
seen to dig by the divining rod for springs which he may never
reach." But he did not ever really do this; he was no dowser; the

*5 J Holmes, J. 9 Sage

revolutionary urges were wholly alien to him. It may be that he
was too skeptical and mordant to wish to break through to new
territory. He did not much like new territory, anyway, or Innova
tion. He had a way of fixing his gaze on the funny part of every
landscape. "I think pragmatism an amusing humbug," he wrote
Pollock, "like most of William James's speculations, as distin
guished from his admirable and well-written Irish perceptions of
life. They all of them seem to me of the type of his answer to
prayer In the subliminal consciousness the spiritualist's promise
of a miracle If you will turn down the gas." Metaphysics he
regarded as mainly "churning the void to make cheese." He read
more history and science than philosophy. Most moralities, theolo
gies, and antitheologles were "human criticism of or rebellion at
the Cosmos, which to my mind is simply damning the weather."
Holmes' The Common Law is still judged a considerable work by
authorities in the field, and it Is a joy to read now simply for
style and logic, but It is essentially, as It was Intended to be, a
piece of nineteenth-century exposition a history and com
mentary lighted by the best of what was then, and largely still
Is, modern thought. What Holmes could do superbly was state a
case or extract an essence in a few clear and compelling words.
Other men in his time labored and produced fat books to make
some point that he could clinch in a single declarative sentence.
Toward the end of his life, there was, for example, a school
called "legal realism." The core of Its doctrine had been ex
pressed by Holmes, In 1897, * n a now famous asseveration: "It
Is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that
so It was laid down in the time of Henry IV." That is the
totality of the case against stare decisis, or abiding by the judicial
precedents. Much of the rest of the case for "legal realism" was
summed up by Holmes In these few words: "The Common Law
Is not a brooding omnipresence In the sky but the articulate
voice of some sovereign or quasi-sovereign that can be identified.
. . . [The law is] what the courts do in fact."

The great thing about Holmes was that he faced the dilemma
of the modern mind he snorted at phrases like that un
flinchingly, merrily, and responsibly, while such contemporaries
as Henry Adams and John Jay Chapman turned Into cranks and

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES j 5 2

helpless neurotics, some of them going clean off their rockers and
others, like Henry James, averting their gaze and dwelling (to the
world's vast profit, in this instance) on other things. Holmes
came to believe, at his father's knee, that "we're in the belly of
the universe, not that it is in us." He thought this anguishing,
and he never stopped thinking about It, but he discovered a way
of living with it. He was a moral and though It did not come
easily to him a compassionate man, and he knew that he was
so partly by choice, partly by breeding. All his values were, in
any case, elected ones; a few he had deliberately chosen, the
rest he deliberately accepted from his forebears and the com
munity, but none of them without reluctance and a certain
amount of grumbling. Perhaps one of the reasons he was not
truly a philosopher was that he found it convenient to go through
life believing no more than he had to believe and investigating
only the irresistible problems. "All I mean by truth is what I
can't help thinking." He hated the bleakness of the world he
saw and the even bleaker horizons that came into view when he
squinted. He could not avoid thinking that "the sacredness of
human life is a purely municipal ideal of no validity outside the
jurisdiction/' But he forced himself to accept the municipal
ideal because his moral instincts told him to and because he was
social that is, because he enjoyed being part of the munici
pality. Politically, his bent was conservative. He simply decided,
early in life, to accept the community values and moralities he
found defensible on terms other than those of truth. "Morality
is simply another means of living," he wrote, "but the saints
make it an end in itself." Nevertheless, he liked it as a way of
living. His morality was conservative and conventional, too.
Theodore Roosevelt once said he could carve from a banana a
judge with more spine than Holmes, This was unfair. Holmes
had no faith in democracy or social welfare or the common people
or the uncommon people, or even, ultimately, in justice, another
municipal ideal. But he could not help thinking that some
things ought to be sacred "I do accept a rough equation between
isness and oughtness" and he settled on some of these. And he
worked up the closest thing he could to fervor. Of free speech,

155 Holmes, /., Sage

he said that "in the abstract, I have no very enthusiastic belief,
though I hope I would die for it."

Holmes was hugely aided, in getting through life in a service
able way, by this ardently felt need for knight-errantry. He
quickly elected to value the idea of dying for sacred principles
even if he could not find any. This at times misled him, at least
from a mid-twentieth-century point of view. Holmes went into
the Union army thinking little of the Union. He regarded
Lincoln as rather a fathead. As for abolitionism, he waxed some
times hot, sometimes cold, but mostly tepid. He gave twenty-five
cents to the Anti-Slavery Society, which was, even by the
standards of the day, pikerish of him. Now and then, he worked
up a degree of conviction, but it never lasted. Yet he fought like
a tiger and toward the end of the war began to take the view that
philosophies should be judged by their power to compel
sacrifice. He held it into the next century. "The faith is true
and adorable/* he wrote Harold Laski, "which leads a soldier
to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty,
in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of
which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see
the use/' True and adorable, indeed! Had he lived a few years
beyond 1935, he would not have said this. Some of his views
his admiration for the martial virtues, his fatalism, his belief
in the futility of most efforts to improve life made him at times
hard and imperious and possibly even cruel. But there was a
warmth to him that pessimism could not reduce by very much,
and there was an immense joie de vivre. "I was repining," he
once wrote Pollock, "at the thought of my slow progress how
few new ideas I had or picked up when it occurred to me to
think of the total of life and how the greater part was wholly
absorbed in living and continuing life victuals procreation
rest and eternal terror. And I bid myself accept the common
lot: an adequate vitality would say daily: 'God what a good
sleep I've had/ *My eye that was a dinner/ 'Now for a rattling
walk * in short, realize life as an end in itself. Functioning is all
there is only our keenest pleasure is in what we might call the
higher sort. I wonder if cosmically an idea is any more important

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 154

than the bowels/* Not more Important cosmically, perhaps, but
other things being equal more Important In lesser ways and,
as a rule, more Interesting. "My aim below/* he wrote Pollock
at another time, "has been solely to make a few competents like
you say that I had hit the ut de poitrlne In my line." The chival
rous assumptions, the pleasure he took in the stuff of life, and
the reaching for high C combined to give us a sage, a noble
jurist, and a very fine writer.

White Mountaineer

I. SHERMAN ADAMS AND BERNARD GOLDFINE
1958

THE DIE WAS CAST, the dew was off the meadow the moment It
became known that It was seldom a Dutch treat when Sherman
Adams, the Assistant to the President, and Bernard Goldfine,
the woollens man, were together. From then on, it mattered very
little whether the House Committee on Legislative Oversight
turned up any new evidence in the case, "I need him," said the
President, knowing the worst, but the correspondents gathered in
the Indian Treaty Room knew what all the king's horses and all
the king's men couldn't do. The political mischief had been done.
When chastity gets lost, it is for keeps. Eisenhower could have
spared himself some awkward times In press conferences by a
stout repudiation of a double standard of political morality, but
consistency Is a mean virtue, and in any case the damage to his
system for subcontracting political authority was beyond repair.
For one thing, Sherman Adams could never again be protected
from the Congress. His vicuna coat might shield him from the
elements,* but it and the Oriental rug and the hotel bills
worked like a radiologist's dose of barium In making him
accessible to close scrutiny. As the President's agent extraordinary,
he had been like the Secret Service and the Central Intelligence
Agency In that he could not function effectively while others
looked on; if he was to be a watched pot, he would never boil.

* Cozlly or otherwise, depending on the quality. After all, the reason Gold-
fine got in trouble in the first place was that the Federal Trade Commission
took the position that there was not as much wool of a certain grade in
Goldfine's yard goods as Goldfine's labels said there was. Had this question
not arisen, there would have been no need for Adams to call the F.T.G. in
Goldfine's behali

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 156

Until last month, he successfully avoided examination. Senator
McCarthy wanted to put him on the stand in the Army-McCarthy
hearings. Senator Kefauver sought his expert testimony during
the fuss over the Dixon-Yates contract. Both times Adams spoke
the magic words about separation of powers and the privileged
character of executive communication, and that was that. But
now, thanks to Goldfine's handsome benefactions, this will no
longer do. Having once admitted a certain confusion of private
affairs with public ones, he has forfeited the right to claim that
he never acts except on behalf of the President. The claim won't
wash. What is more, Mr. Adams has probably made it impossible
for any successor to enjoy the immunity he has enjoyed. If he
quits and a successor is found, the new man will be under
surveillance.

From the start, Adams and his White House associates, includ
ing the President, have relied on defensive strategies that are
just about as damaging as an outright admission of malfeasance.
One is the tu quoque, or you're another, argument, which
consists in pointing out that most members of Congress and
many members of the press have received favors from private
citizens and done favors in return. The noted entertainer and
public-relations authority Tex McCrary has been installed in the
Mayflower to gather bushels of documents to support this argu
ment, which, putting aside all questions of relevance and logic,
has the disadvantage of making enemies in exactly those places
where friends are most needed. The other line of defense has
even graver flaws. To assert his integrity, Adams has had to
concede a lack of good sense. With an innocence that would have
done him credit if innocence were of much value in his calling,
he told the Harris Subcommittee that he had made errors "of
judgment but not of intent," and the President seconded this by
saying that, as he saw it, his Assistant had not been wicked but
only "imprudent/' Some defense of Adams* virtue was certainly
called for, but to explain that what may have had the appearance
of moral delinquency was only bad judgment is hardly, in this
case, more helpful than it would be to say of a banker, for
example, that the man did not lack a knowledge of finance but
was merely, on occasion, larcenous, To put it rather coarsely,

/57 White Mountaineer

Adams was put on the payroll not to exercise his honesty but to
apply good judgment. As between a defect of virtue and a defect
of prudence, the latter may be, from the point of view of the
general welfare, the more serious. The commonwealth as a whole
would not have suffered greatly If In fact Adams had put In the
fix at the Federal Trade Commission so that his friend could
label his merchandise as he chose. But a few lapses from good
sense by a man wielding such powers as Adams is reputed to
have had could be costly and painful to everyone.

He will not again wield great powers, even In the unlikely
event that he stays on through the end of his patron's term.
There is, of course, a certain amount of doubt as to whether the
powers he wielded deserve to be described in the terms the press
has generally used. Adams was never a high-policy man. John
Foster Dulles has had complete charge of diplomacy, George
Humphrey has called the tune on ways and means, and the
President himself has laid down the administration line on
welfare issues. Adams has had a hand In patronage and politics
and office management. He has checked the mail; handled visitors
who cannot be turned away at the front door yet do not rate an
audience with Himself; and settled arguments that arise among
administration officials. His work has not required unique gifts,
but this, probably, does not alter the fact that his presence has
been Important. When Eisenhower came to office, necessity
mothered the invention of a deputy President. The new President
lacked, on the one hand, political experience, and, on the other,
a zest for acquiring it. Most of the tasks that have taken up most
of the time of Presidents Interested him hardly at all, and most
of the people a President normally sees were not to his taste.
There simply had to be a Sherman Adams, and it Is interesting
now to recall that Eisenhower knew this from before the start;
he came back from Europe to enter the New Hampshire pri
maries and right away hired the Governor of New Hampshire,
one of the first politicians he met. Adams has been essential to
him. The kind of work he does makes him expendable, provided
he Is replaceable. A willing successor might easily enough be
found, but the very fact that he was Adams' successor would
make him vulnerable. For a time, at least, no one will be allowed

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 158

to work in the shadows. It appears very much as if Eisenhower
will have to do for himself whatever it is that Adams has always
done for him.

The question that everyone in Washington has been trying
to answer is: How on earth did Sherman Adams get into this
mess in the first place? What weakness of perception allowed him
to accept, of all things, a coat from a man he knew to be at odds
with the authorities? The hotel bills one can perhaps under
stand, despite the fact that a member of the Truman administra
tion owed his downfall to a few days on the cuff at the Saxony In
Miami Beach; still and all, hotel bills can be regarded as enter
tainment. And a rug for one's living-room floor, particularly if
there was some talk of returning it one day, could just possibly
be regarded as what the President described as "a tangible
expression of friendship." But for a man charged, as Adams was,
with most of the work in cleaning up "the mess in Washington"
to accept the symbolic garment of corruption, a coat, from a
businessman petitioning the government for relief this has
flabbergasted all of Washington. What was Sherman Adams
thinking of? How could any man in his right mind have been
so foolish? Adams' admirers have never been great in number
in the capital (no one in his position could hope for too many
admirers), but it has never been suggested that the man is a
fool. Thus far, his association with Goldfine is his only really
striking error of judgment. Nor is it credible that he is simply
one more venal politician. If he were, he would have covered
his tracks more artfully, and the chances are that he would have
had far less to do with such compulsive name-droppers as Ber
nard Goldfine and Goldfine's odd associate of former times,
John Fox. Also, if personal gain had been his central motive,
he would have left the administration some while back and ex
ploited his connections from the outside, where the exploiting is
really good. Whatever else may be said of the Assistant to the
President, the length of his service testifies either to his loyalty
to his President and his party or to his fondness for power and
conceivably to a combination of these. Moreover, he has served,
as far as anyone now knows, selflessly; it is impossible to detect
In any of the transactions in which he has been known to have

15^ White Mountaineer

had a part any self-serving decisions or resolutions. Members of
the Harris Subcommittee have said that they have not yet un
folded the whole story of Sherman Adams, but It is a fairly safe bet
that if the files currently held anything juicier than what has been
spread on the record over the past month, some indication of
the character of this intelligence would by now have been given.
If Adams is neither stupid nor venal, the law must lie some
where in his political education and perhaps, too, in the political
atmosphere that envelops him. He must simply never have under
stood that his relationship with Goldfine would be interpreted
by most people as being quite as improper as anything that came
to light in the Truman administration and at the same time
downright hilarious to those who have always regarded him as
the sternest of the deacons in the Eisenhower administration.
When he ordered the late Harold Talbott to resign as Secretary
of the Air Force because Talbott had attended to some personal
affairs on office time and written some private letters on office
stationery, he must have thought of his action not as a defense
of morality but simply as the enforcement of a house rule. This
confusion of values, if that is what it was, might be explained
by the fact that his whole training has been that of a provincial
politician. When he met Eisenhower, he was a lumber merchant
who had served briefly in the New Hampshire legislature, a
single term in the House of Representatives, and two terms as
governor of New Hampshire. Before he became an Eisenhower
enthusiast (he had, he once explained, been on Senator Robert
A. Taft's side on most matters of policy, but he became convinced
early in 1952 that the then General was "the fastest horse in the
stable"), he had had no experience in national politics aside
from his two years in the House, which is an extraterritorial
jungle inhabited by tribesmen whose chief concern while
there is with what is going on around the council fires at
home. As a New Hampshire politician, Adams had gone to a
school in which the prevailing moral philosophies are as
greatly at variance with those professed in Washington as if
they came from two wholly different societies in wholly different
stages of development. In most state governments, and notably
in that of New Hampshire, the idea of conflict of interest simply

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 160

does not exist. On the contrary, a mutuality of interest between
government and business is taken for granted, and men often go
into the legislative branches to represent their businesses. Adams
used to have no hesitation in telling his early biographers that
he had entered the New Hampshire legislature which is, in
cidentally, one of the world's largest parliaments, with 424 mem
bers, or one for every one thousand citizens of the state at the
instance of his superiors in the Parker- Young Lumber Company
and primarily for the purpose of representing the firm. In state
politics, especially in those states that have not yet got what
they regard as their full share of capital investment, a man who
speaks for a prominent industry is very much pro bono publico.
A good many politicians take the statehouse view of life to
Washington, but as a rule the view undergoes certain modifica
tions. They come to regard themselves, particularly if they are
Republicans, as spokesmen not for a particular business but for
an entire industry or for business in general. And the quicker
ones learn in good time that the gratuities that may be accepted
in state politics (all forty-eight governors gratefully accepted
bolts of vicuna from Bernard Goldfine) can get a man in serious
trouble in Washington. In Adams' case, quite evidently, no such
change occurred. This could be because he is an excessively pro
vincial man and an excessively insensitive one. He has been one of
the largest figures in the administration right from the start,
but the conditions of his work and the austerity of his life may
have made it impossible for him to appreciate that Washington
is different from Concord in fundamental ways. He has been un
accountable not only to Congress but to the press and to other
members of the administration. He has worked behind closed
doors in the White House and, as the President's accredited
deputy, has had everyone except Eisenhower himself come to him
when he called. So far as is known, his off-duty life has not been
a broadening one; he has always been thought of as a Yankee
villager who kept Epworth League hours, except on choir-re
hearsal nights, and few things have been more surprising to his
colleagues about the recent revelations than that he had so gay
and worldly a friend as Bernard Goldfine and that he frequented

161 White Mountaineer

such places as the Carlton, the Sheraton-Plaza and the Waldorf-
Astoria. The general belief even now is that these were novel
associations for him and that their very novelty and glamour
blinded him to the consequences of enjoying them. The cruel
word "hick" has been a good deal used in discussions of the
mystery of his behavior. It was surely a countryman speaking
when his first response to the charge that he had received an
800 coat was that this was untrue because he had looked into
the matter and found that its real value was $69.

Yet the mystery is not dissolved by any amount of digging into
Adams* past or by speculations about his life in Washington.
He had, after all, assimilated enough of the spirit and rhetoric
of political uplift to make acceptable speeches and to register
hot indignation when other men embarrassed the White House
by their associations. He has been quick to learn all the other
rules of political self-preservation. If it was mere self-righteous
ness, a belief that it was all right for him to do what he had
fired other men for doing, his New Hampshire canniness should
have warned him at least to be more careful and artful than he
was. And if, on the other hand, some Yankee-trader instinct was
working deep within him, the concern with appearances that
all politicians provincial or otherwise have, should have told
him that this would at least look bad and that by far the better
deal, in the long run, would be to pass up the opportunities his
friendship with Goldfine afforded. His needless, pointless fall
from grace is easily the most baffling problem in political be
havior to come along in years.

II. SHERMAN ADAMS AND
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

1961

MOST OF Sherman Adams' First-Hand Report is not first-hand at
all, but second- or third-hand. Adams recounts at length crucial

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 162

events in which he had little or no part the Suez crisis, Dien-
bienphu, the Bermuda Conference of 1953, the Geneva Confer
ence of 1955, and the recurrent alarms over Quemoy and Matsu
and his reports appear to benefit very little from his intimacy
with the President. It seems, on first thought anyway, odd that
this man, whose talent was narrowly executive and whose com
petence, so far as is known, was limited to insular affairs, should
now be so preoccupied with matters of high policy abroad. But
perhaps it is not so odd: these were the memorable affairs, and
it may well be that if he had stuck to matters he knew intimately,
he would have been writing almost exclusively about trivialities.
Even in those days when everyone in Washington spoke of him
as the power behind the throne and the closest thing to a deputy
President in American history, it was difficult to learn or even
to imagine exactly what he did with his time. Here and there,
the suspicion grew that his work might not be as demanding and
as important as it was said to be. The Goldfine affair and the
other difficulties that led to his departure, in 1958, strengthened
this suspicion. A power behind the throne who had time to stop
by the Carl ton in midafternoon; who was frequently on the
telephone discussing the affairs of nonscheduled airlines, textile
manufacturers, and television operators in provincial cities; and
who ran up sizable bills at the Sheraton-Plaza, in Boston, obvi
ously was not burning himself out as a Richelieu. Adams' book
is not of much help in explaining his role. In a chapter called
"At Work in the White House/' he remarks that he could not
sit in on many of the discussions of policy "that Eisenhower
wanted me to attend" because "I had too many telephone calls,
too much paperwork, and too many appointments at my own
office, as well as a White House staff to supervise," He goes on
to say, "Somebody who made a count of such things once esti
mated that my outgoing and incoming telephone calls were usu
ally 250 a day and that figure was probably not far from right."
It sounds quite far from right. At two minutes a call, with no
rest at all for voice and ears, he would have been on the phone
for more than eight hours and would never have made the
Carlton or got much paperwork done. Still, the record does show

163 White Mountaineer

that he was on the telephone quite a bit. But the importance of
it all is another matter. Adams could not have thought it alto
gether vital to the welfare of the administration, for he says that
after a year at the White House he was offered a job that paid
better money and was eager to take it. "I talked to the President
about it, reminding him that he had often urged us to speak up
If any opportunity came along that we felt, for our own economic
security, ought not to be turned down." Eisenhower remembered,
and was ready to let Adams go if Henry Cabot Lodge could be
persuaded to stop arguing with Andrei Vishinsky and become
the new power behind the throne. Adams knew then what Eisen
hower was to learn that Lodge was having a great time in New
York and could not be talked into helping the President run
the country from Washington. "I was sure," Adams writes, "that
Lodge, if he could help it, would have nothing to do with scrub
bing the administrative and political backstairs as I was doing at
the White House/'

Adams' memoir is rough going most of the way. Its length is
excessive, its tone is flat, its detail is boring and mostly insignif
icant, its revelations are depressing. Still, it does contain revela
tions most of them, one suspects, unintentional. Adams says
of Eisenhower that "temperamentally, he was the ideal Presi
dent/* But Adams plainly understands that temperament is not
everything. Even what Adams considers an ideal one was no
defense against na"ivet< and lack of firmness. Adams knew that
the President was kidding himself in thinking for a moment that
Lodge would go backstairs in the White House, and he knew
that the President was naive about many other things. So did
others in the administration. When it was pointed out that re
strictions sought by business in our trade arrangements with
the Japanese might drive the Japanese into deals with Peking,
Eisenhower (according to Adams) asked George Humphrey if
American businessmen might "make some sacrifices in such a
situation in the interests of world peace." "No," Humphrey re
plied. "The American businessman believes in getting as much
as he can while the getting is good." The President accepted
this judgment but said "seriously," according to Adams

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 164

"Maybe that's the trouble with businessmen, George." Adams'
Eisenhower is an almost hopeless idealist surrounded by men
with a superior knowledge of the world. Senators Taft, Know-
land, and Styles Bridges, the Secretary o Defense, the Secretary
of State, and half the rest of the Cabinet were always setting him
straight about the realities of life and about the impossibility of
fulfilling his pleasant hopes. Adams speaks of Everett Dirksen,
the last of Eisenhower's three leaders in the Senate, who had
"with considerable political gallantry come around to accept
more and more of Eisenhower's views and solutions to major
foreign problems." When such considerable gallantry was lack
ing, as it was most of the time, Eisenhower did nothing. "Before
I worked for him," Adams writes, "I assumed Eisenhower would
be a hard taskmaster. . . . But he seldom called anybody down
when he was displeased with his work and I never knew him
to punish anybody. . . . Though contrary to his nature, a
tougher . . . line would have brought better results." Adams
mentions only two cases in which Eisenhower took a real stand
with Congress. One was in backing up his Secretary of Agri
culture. "If I can't stick with [Ezra Taft] Benson," Adams reports
the President said, "I'll have to find some way of turning in my
own suit, or 111 just be known as a damned coward." The other
was his announcement of his intention to prevent any Demo
cratic attempt to enlarge the Tennessee Valley Authority. "It's
time to stop being bulldozed!" he said. The President felt no
call to valor in the matter of Senator McCarthy's bulldozing, and
Adams says that, as a matter of principle, Eisenhower "did not
make a decision, or take a public stand on an issue, when it was
not necessary." It was on this account that he did not make firm
statements on several aspects of racial integration. The President
was intermittently aware of the pain he gave his party comrades
by the positions he chose to defend and by those he chose to leave
undefended, and he could be hurt by the lack of respect accorded
his judgment. Adams recalls Eisenhower's reactions after a Re
publican strategy meeting in Denver in 1952: "When Humphreys
[Robert Humphreys, a National Committee public-relations man]
finished with the presentation, Eisenhower said nothing. I could

16^ White Mountaineer

see that beneath his usual outward composure something had
annoyed and upset him. I asked Mm later what had bothered
him, 'All they talked about was how they would win on my
popularity/ he said. 'Nobody said I had a brain in my head.' "
The most interesting sections are those on the President and
his first Secretary of State. "In the quiet of Eisenhower's home,"
Adams writes, without saying how he knew what went on there,
"Dulles had talked about [their] relationship before they had
begun their official association. 'With my understanding of the
intricate relationships between the peoples of the world and your
sensitiveness to the political considerations involved, we will
make the most successful team in history/ " It is hard to believe
that Dulles actually dared to put it this way (it was close to
saying "with my brains and your popularity"), but it is easy to
believe that he thought of it this way. By Adams' account,
Eisenhower feared the consequences of Dulles but hesitated to
restrain "the best Secretary of State he ever knew/ " "Eisenhower,
of course, was well aware that his own approach to foreign prob
lems was far more conciliatory than Dulles's. . . . Dulles was
readier to fight for Quemoy and Matsu than Eisenhower was/'
Eisenhower tried to assert his own views through other people.
He had C. D. Jackson, Harold Stassen, and Nelson Rockefeller
working on psychological warfare and disarmament. Dulles
couldn't abide any of them and eventually got the President to
drop them. At Geneva in 1955, while Eisenhower was talking up
Rockefeller's "open skies" scheme, Dulles "passed the word to his
staff that he wanted disarmament talks 'closed out quietly/ "
Dulles, of course, wished that Eisenhower himself would stay out
of diplomacy. Adams writes, "When Eisenhower's Paris summit
conference with Khrushchev collapsed in 1960, I could hear
Dulles saying, 'Now do you see what I mean?* " Not long after
the Paris disaster, Adams came down from Franconia Notch for
a reunion with Eisenhower at Newport, Rhode Island, "Foster
Dulles's opposition to what he regarded as foredoomed summit
conferences now takes on more aspects of wisdom/' he observed
to Eisenhower. 'Tester Dulles was a great man/' the President
said. "Foster had one g^reat quality somebody could disagree

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 166

with him violently but he never bore any ill feeling after the
argument was over." 3 * It is doubtful if this really was Dulles's
most striking or most admirable quality, but it was one that the
most amiable of Presidents rated highly indeed.

* In the summer of 1961, Drew Pearson had an interview with Nikita
Khrushchev, who, according to Pearson, said, "I came to have admiration for
Dulles before he died. He could disagree with you, but you knew exactly
where he stood/ 1

The Importance of George Orwell

1956

THE LATE George Orwell was a novelist, a journalist, an essayist, a
literary critic, a political polemicist, an occasional poet, and a
man whose mark on Ms contemporaries was and is large and
clear and good. He was central to Ms time, which is our time
from the late twenties to the fifties and into the plausible terrors
of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

He was born in India in 1903 and died in England in 1950, of
a lung ailment contracted in childhood. George Orwell was a
pen name he took in 1934; he had been christened Eric Blair.
At the time of Ms death, he had been a writer for less than twenty
years, and for almost half of that period he had been quite ob
scure. Nevertheless, it is difficult to call to mind any figure of
the twentieth century, apart from the seminal thinkers like
Freud and Dewey and the literary innovators like Joyce and
Eliot, whose inluence has been as sharp and visible and cleansing
as Orwell's. In the closing years of his life, when Animal Farm
and Nineteen Eighty-Four were being read everywhere, the world
had a sense of him as a prophet. Animal Farm was published here
in 1946 (many publishers rejected it on the ground that it would
have a disturbing influence on Soviet-American relations), and
I do not think it would be going too far to say that it did as
much to clear the air as Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain**
speech of the same year an oratorical salvo often cited by his
torians as the starting point of Western resistance to Soviet im
perialism. By 1949, when Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared, Or
well was by no means a lonely prophet; by then, the wilderness
was full of voices. But Orwell's had a stunning clarity and edge.

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 168

Anyone could see the flower of totalitarianism in Stalin's Russia
or Stalin's Poland or Stalin's Czechoslovakia. It took Orwell to
uncover the living roots of totalitarianism in contemporary
thought and speech, in the puritanism of civic virtue, in our
slackening of ties with the usable past, in cravenness before the
gods of security, in mass entertainment's deadening of impulses.
He put Newspeak and Doublethink into the language, and our
habits of speech and thought are the better for this. If we and
our offspring never have to endure Nineteen Eighty-Four, we and
they will have Orwell partly to thank.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was a dazzling illumination, and I sup
pose that for most people it will always be the first thing to
spring to mind whenever Orwell's name is mentioned just as
most of us, in free association, would respond to "Swift" with
"Gulliver's Travels." Yet it was not Orwell's first illumination
but his last. Years earlier, even before Animal Farm had won
him his first really wide circle of readers, he had exerted a
liberating and strengthening influence on a whole generation of
writers and intellectuals. That generation, of which I am a mem
ber, knew him first as a journalist. In my own case, I did not
even know that he had written any fiction until some time after
I read his political and literary criticism. (A few of his early
novels were published here in the early thirties, but they at
tracted little attention and quickly went out of print. They were
not reissued until 1950 or after.) I think my own awareness of
him must date from late 1939 or *&ore probably early 1940; in
any case, I knew enough about him by 1941 to go to some lengths
to get hold of a copy of The Lion and the Unicorn, a wartime
study of English life and ideals that has never been published
here. Orwell was a socialist when he wrote it, as he was to the day
of his death, and the book may justly be regarded as a piece of
socialist literature, though it spends less time telling how social
ism might improve England than how England might improve
socialism.

I followed The Lion and the Unicorn with Homage to Cata
lonia and all the fugitive pieces, in English periodicals and in
Partisan Review, that I could lay hands on. It was OrwelFs view
of any particular question that made his work as a journalist so

i$9 The Importance of George Orwell

exciting and Ms example as a writer so bracing to his colleagues.
Nor was it merely the verve and acuity of Ms writing, though this
was indeed part of it: quite apart from any special tendencies
of his thinking, he was a magnificent performer. But the im
portant and stirring thing was the way he coupled contempt for
all the "smelly little orthodoxies" of his time with a continuing
interest in ideas and a decent respect for the opinions of man
kind. He was free, on the one hand, of pieties of any sort and,
on the other, of flippancy. He was at once responsible and abso
lutely independent, and this in a day when responsibility and
independence were customarily disjoined. He fused a moral com
mitment with a fiercely critical mind and spirit, and if today
there are more writers who approach this ideal than there were
twenty years ago, it is largely because they have profited by his
precepts and have been moved by the magnificent gesture of his
career.

Orwell was a writer of great force and distinction. He would
be remembered today if he had been only a journalist and critic.
But he was far more; he was among other things, though cer
tainly first among them an artist, and a many-sided one. The
thrust of his moral imagination has been felt by all those who
read Nineteen Eighty-Four, but that was by no means the end
of it, nor was it the beginning. Though Nineteen Eighty-Four
was no doubt his most important book, that work of apocalyptic
fury did not provide the most impressive display of his gifts.
The reader of Burmese Days and Coming Up for Air,, which
seem to me the two most successful of his early novels, will dis
cover that his imagination was more than moral. He could deal
superbly with the individual consciousness and with the inter
course of character. He could be wonderfully evocative of moods
and times and scenes and conditions of life. No one who has seen
anything of England or encountered any members of the British
lower middle class can miss the verisimilitude of Coming Up for
Air. We have it on excellent authority that Burmese Days is as
sensitive a rendering of Indian and Anglo-Saxon life; in any
case, it could scarcely be more memorable. I would rank Down
and Out in Paris and London with these two novels if I did not
think It too directly autobiographical and reportorial a work to

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES jyo

be described as a novel at all; whatever Its category, It Is a match
lessly vivid description of the life of poverty and unemployment
and squalor. It is Impossible to read the plongeur passages with
out having the sensation of gray soapy water sloshing about the
arms up to the elbow. Though Orwell's bent was for such
description and for a manner that is ironical, astringent, and
detached, he could on occasion be lyrical and quite astonishingly
tender, as one may learn from the sections on Tubby Bowling's
boyhood in Coming Up for Air or from the haunting and pa
thetic scenes between Julia and Winston in Nineteen Eighty-
Four.

In all of his novels, including those that might, on balance, be
described as failures, one feels oneself always in the presence of
a writer who is fully alive and has eyes and an intellect and a
vibrant character of his own. The conventions of criticism de
mand, I suppose, that he be placed as a "minor" novelist. He
was not in any crucial sense an innovator, and he did not pene
trate the mysteries to the depths reached by Dostoevski or Con
rad. He did not people a world as Balzac did though one has
the feeling that something like this would have been within his
powers if he had devoted himself entirely to fiction or if he had
lived and written longer. He was of the second rank, but he was
never second-rate, and to my mind and taste the distinction is
anything but invidious. All of us, I think, get major satisfactions
from certain minor novelists, and minor satisfactions from certain
major novelists. Stendhal, for example, means less to me than
Samuel Butler, and Orwell more than Joyce. I believe that Or
well Is, as Irving Howe has said, "one of the few contemporary
writers who really matter/'

John Atkins, the author of a useful critical study of Orwell,
has said that "his uniqueness lay in his having the mind of an
intellectual and the feelings of a common man/' I cannot quite
accept this, for I recognize no sentient state that can be described
as "the feelings of a common man/' As for "the mind of an
intellectual," that is what every intellectual has. Still, I think
Atkins is reaching for a central truth about Orwell and one that
is not easy to grasp. Perhaps one could say that his uniqueness lay
to some degree in his almost studied avoidance of the unique.

iji The Importance of George Orwell

The experience he chose to deal with was the kind of experience
known to large numbers of people, to whole social classes, to
entire nations. He did not often concern himself with the single
Instance. As a novelist, he was rather old-fashioned in the sense
that he did not explore the extremes of behavior. The merely
anomalous, the merely phenomenal, the exotic, the bizarre none
of these attracted his interest very much. In fact, the most obvious
and persistent of his faults was an intolerance of eccentricity and
neurosis. As a critic, he was rather old-fashioned in the sense that
he paid the most attention to books that have been read by
millions and left to other critics those works of genius that are
admired chiefly In genius circles. It was Dickens and Kipling,
staples In a national culture, rather than, say, Henry James or
Gerard Manley Hopkins, who drew forth his greatest critical
efforts. He pioneered in the serious analysis of popular culture,
writing brilliantly of "good bad" books, boys' magazines, patri
otic verse and marching songs, penny dreadfuls, and even the
bawdy postcards on sale at seaside resorts. In a striking essay on
Henry Miller, which was, I think, one of his few appreciations of
what some people would call a "coterie" writer, he found It neces
sary to convince himself that the lives of the odd fish of whom
Miller wrote "overlap fairly widely with those of more normal
people/* Had he been unable to say this, *he would have been
unable to admire Miller.

He set great store by normality. This Is not to say that he
despised the extraordinary or placed no value on the uncom
mon or superior. He was an extraordinary person himself, he de
tested conformity, and he never celebrated mediocrity. "The
average sensual man Is out of fashion," he wrote, and he pro
posed to restore him, giving him "the power of speech, like
Balaam's ass" and uncovering his genius. Because we know that
he believed there was a great deal In a name, we can assume
that In Nineteen Eighty-Four he did not settle lightly on one
for the central character, Winston Smith, who linked the memory
of a most uncommon Englishman with the commonest of English
patronymics. What Orwell cared about most deeply was the
general quality of human experience in his time. The virtues he
honored were the universally accessible ones candor, courage,

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 172

love, common sense, Integrity, decency, charity. The tyrannies
he anatomized were those that could hurt us all.

Orwell, who was fascinated by the English class structure and
enjoyed drawing fine distinctions of status, spoke of his own
family as members of the "upper lower middle class." His father
was in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service and
was at Motihari when Orwell was born. Orwell was one of three
children; his home life, he said, was drab, and he felt "Isolated
and under-valued/* It Is safe to assume that he changed his name
because he disliked the memory of the years in which he had
borne it. He told friends that he found the name itself unpleas
ant; he said he did not care for the Scottishness of Blair or the
Norseness of Eric and felt more content wih a surname taken
from an English river he had loved and a resoundingly British
Christian name. If his home life was dreary, it was also brief. "I
barely saw my father before I was eight," he wrote. And at eight
he was sent to a boarding school on the South Coast, the inferior
place he calls Crossgates in "Such, Such Were the Joys . . . ," an
essay full of that anguishing vividness he scarcely ever failed to
achieve. It is possible that the reality of Crossgates was not quite
as bad as the memory of It. Cyril Connolly was there at the same
time, and in Enemies of Promise makes the school, which he
calls St. Wulfrlc's, sound a somewhat happier place and Orwell
a somewhat happier boy than we find in OrwelFs account. But
with childhood, it is always the memory that counts. At Cross-
gates, Orwell did what was expected of him and won a scholar
ship to Eton. He finished Eton and acknowledged in later life
that he had rather liked the place, but he did not go on to a
university. He thought it better to see something of "real life/'
He went back to India and served five years in Burma as a mem
ber of the Indian Imperial Police. He was to some extent at least
the Flory of Burmese Days, a guilt-ridden servant and beneficiary
of the Raj.

In the essay "Why I Write," Orwell says that he had known
his vocation from the age of five or six but that from the age of
seventeen to twenty-four, a period that included all the Burma
years, he had sought to escape it, "with the consciousness that

/73 The Importance of George Orwell

I was outraging my true nature." So far as I know, he never
explained why he sought to iee what he regarded as his destiny
or whether he had in mind some other fulfillment. As a matter
of fact, it is difficult to find one's way about in the years between
Eric Blair's adolescence and the emergence of George Orwell in
1934, when he was thirty-one. His own writings are vague as to
dates and sequences in this period. I think it is quite clear,
though, that he was a young man who suffered a good many
torments of mind and spirit. His attempt to avoid writing could
have resulted from an admixture of insecurity, or fear of failure,
and self-denial. There are traces of Calvinist asceticism all
through his work. At any rate, not long after his return from
Burma, he entered upon the mortification of the flesh that pro
vided him with the materials for Down and Out in Paris and
London. He sought out poverty, whether to write about it or
merely to suffer It we cannot tell. "What I profoundly wanted at
that time," he wrote several years later, in The Road to Wigan
Pier,, "was to find some way of getting out of the respectable
world altogether." But why did he seek out misery? Why did he
embrace poverty Instead of Bohemia? John Atkins has said that
the moment Orwell thought of anything beyond endurance, he
put himself to the test of enduring It. I think there Is something
to this. It was compulsive behavior, almost masochistic in char
acter, and it makes Orwell's retention of Independence and cool
judgment all the more Interesting and all the more Impressive.
The most powerful critic of fanaticism in our time was a man
who had a good many fanatical impulses.

He has said that he spent about two years In all In the lower
depths of Paris and London. It is hard to tell whether or not
this was one continuous experience. At some point between 1928
and 1934, he taught school for a while, and at another time he
worked as a clerk in a bookshop. After 1933, there are few un
certainties. In that year, his first journalism began to appear
articles and reviews under the name of Eric Blair in Adelphi and
other magazines. Down and Out was published in 1933 and
Burmese Days In 1934, when he became Orwell. His surrender to
destiny was now complete. He did a book a year for several years,
in addition to the newspaper and magazine work that kept him

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 174

alive. After Burmese Days, there were three more books dealing
with poverty. A Clergyman's Daughter , published In 1935, and
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, published In 1936, are novels of
English life. They have their particular distinctions the Tra
falgar Square scene from A Clergyman's Daughter may well be
the finest thing in all of OrwelFs fiction but they are not his
best work. In them, however, one can trace his growing concern
with politics and his drift toward socialism. He was a socialist
by the time he did the fourth of his books on poverty, The Road
to Wigan Pier, which was published in England in 1937 and
has not yet been published in this country,* doubtless because,
being largely a factual report on the mining communities of
South Wales In the worst part of the depression, it has been
thought to have too antiquarian a flavor. But then the bubonic
plague of which Defoe and Pepys wrote had lost a good deal of Its
topicality, and Orwell on life In Swansea and Wigan and New
castle in 1936 seems to me fully the peer of Defoe and Pepys on
London in 1664.

The Road to Wigan Pier is a masterpiece. It is also a basic
document in the intellectual history of this century. The book
had been commissioned by Victor Gollancz, the publisher, on
behalf of the Left Book Club, an organization whose tendency
is evident in its title, as a study of human misery In an exploita
tive social order. The first half is exactly that. Orwell was never
more brilliant as a journalist. The second part is an examination
of socialism as a remedy. It was perhaps the most rigorous exami
nation that any doctrine has ever received at the hands of an
adherent. It was so tough, so disrespectful, so rich in heresies that
Gollancz, who, as proprietor of the Left Book Club was the
shepherd of a flock that scandalized as easily as any Wesleyan
congregation, published the book only after writing an introduc
tion that could not have been more strained and apologetic if
he had actually been a Wesleyan minister who for some Improb
able reason found himself the sponsor of a lecture by George
Bernard Shaw on the Articles of Religion. Gollancz's plight was
in some respects even more difficult than that hypothetical one,

* Since this piece was written, Wigan Pier has been published in the
United States by Haicourt, Brace & World in 1958.

175 2"^* Importance of George Orwell

since it was necessary for him to concede that the early chapters
"really are the kind of thing that makes converts."

In discomfiting his fellow socialists as he did, Orwell per
formed, for the first time, what was to become his characteristic
service to his generation. In 1956, I find it rather awkward
indeed, I find it downright embarrassing to have the responsi
bility of explaining exactly what this service was. For it was
really nothing more or less than clearing minds of cant, and the
service should never have been necessary in the first place. It
has to be understood that the typical intellectual of the thirties
was a man so shocked by social injustice and the ghastly spectacle
of fascism that his brain was easily addled by anyone who pro
posed a quick and drastic remedy. The humanistic mind in those
days was poorly equipped to deal with social and political ideas,
and grappled with them almost as awkwardly as in recent years
it has grappled with the problems of nuclear physics. We tend
now to recall Communism as the only brain-addler of the period,
but there were others. Non-Communist liberalism had a way
of stiffening into illiberal orthodoxies, as did pacifism. Fascism
itself won over a few essentially humanistic intelligences, and
so did extreme conservatism. Almost at the onset of social and
political consciousness, intellectuals surrendered their critical
faculties. Many of them thought they had excellent reasons for
doing so. It was perfectly obvious, they would argue, that the
conditions that cried out for change would not be changed by
individuals. Still less would they be changed by acts of cerebra
tion. They would be changed only by the action of large numbers
of people by parties, by armies, by collectivities of one sort or
another. Parties and armies require discipline. Discipline neces
sarily calls for a ceding of rights and privileges. Ergo> for the
benefit of mankind, for the prisoners of starvation, for the
greatest good of the greatest number, for the Cause, it is necessary
to give up the right to be critics, iconoclasts, Bohemians, indi
vidualists.

It can be objected, I know, that I am only describing a species
of conformity and that conformity continues to be quite a prob
lem. Certainly it does, and that is one of the reasons why Orwell
is needed today. But today's conformity is one of assent, and

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES zj6

I am talking about a conformity of dissent, which is in many
ways a more terrible thing. Twenty years ago, it was the critics
of society who allowed their critical powers to atrophy; it was
the independent-minded who threw away their independence.
W. H. Auden, the poet of the decade, wrote the apologia in a
quatrain that stands as the dedication to Erika Mann in On This
Island, published in 1937, the Wigan Pier year:

Since the external disorder, and extravagant lies
The baroque frontiers, the surrealist police;
What can truth treasure, heart bless,
But a narrow strictness?

To some of us, it seemed a compelling and quite lovely bit of
poet's logic. To Orwell, it was a non sequitur illogical and un
lovely.

Orwell arrived on the scene in the middle thirties and pro
ceeded to fire the camps of the orthodox wherever he found
them. How he came to this role is, I think, quite a mystery. His
acquaintance with social and political ideas and practices was,
if anything, even slighter than that of most of his contemporaries,
and there were, as I have suggested, aspects of his temperament
that seemed to make him rather a promising candidate for
fanaticism. Nevertheless, he stood almost alone in his generation
as a man of consistent good judgment and as one who never for
a moment doubted that it was possible to be at once humanistic
and tough-minded, to make commitments and avoid the perils
of commitment. He was no less shocked by social injustice and
fascism than the next man. He had known poverty and had
written four books on it, at least two of which, Down and Out
and Wigan Pier, are classics. He saw the point about parties and
armies and took more than his share of responsibilities. For all
his heresies as a socialist, he was no stranger to the grubbiest of
political chores, and in 1936 he went to Spain and bore arms
against fascism an experience that led to another classic, Hom
age to Catalonia. He was not, of course, alone in seeing the perils
of Commitment, but most of the others who saw the perils either
withdrew their commitments or made silly counter-commitments.
Orwell did neither. He felt that withdrawal was out of the ques-

IJ7 The Importance of George Orwell

tlon "unless you are armored by old age or stupidity or hypoc
risy." But of the committed writer he said, "His writings, in so
far as they are to have any value, will always be the product
of the saner self that stands aside, records the things that are
done and admits their necessity, but refuses to be deceived as
to their true nature." He was seldom deceived as to the true
nature of anything.

"He was the conscience of his generation," V. S. Pritchett said,
meaning, of course, his generation of writers. Up to 1945, he
was very little known in this country, and his British audience
was pretty well limited to the readers of the weeklies and
monthlies of opinion. He was becoming established as a critic
and journalist when he went to Spain. He was wounded in the
neck and hospitalized in L^rida; he had joined the P.O.U.M.,
which opposed the Communists and was critical of the Popular
Front government from a more or less Trotskyist point of view,
and he left Spain with some difficulty and with a price on his
head. He published Homage to Catalonia in 1938: though it was
a passionately Loyalist book, it gave as great offense to the pas
sionate Loyalists as Wigan Pier had given to socialists and Com
munists, and by the time of his death had sold only nine hundred
copies. From 1938 to the middle years of World War II, he had
a difficult time of it; he was held in great admiration by people
whose admiration was worth having, but partly because of his
political views and partly because of the general dislocations of
the period he had little work and little sense of function. He
wanted to join the army, but the army would not have him. In
1939, he published Coming Up for Air, and in 1941 The Lion
and the Unicorn, but these did little to help keep him alive or
relieve his sense of frustration. He served in the Home Guard,
did occasional scripts for the British Broadcasting Corporation,
and wrote brilliantly from London for the Partisan Review in
New York. It was not until fairly well along in the war that he
attracted a sizable British audience for his periodical writing,
most of which appeared in the Laborite Tribune. His tubercu
losis, which he never seems to have done much about, had
progressed during the war; it was in an advanced and incurable
state by 1945, so that for the short period in which he had

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES i 7 8

a large number of readers, from the publication of Animal Farm
until his death in a sanatorium a few months after the publica
tion of Nineteen Eighty -Four, life held many agonies and few
rewards. He once said that Nineteen Eighty-Four would have
been a less bleak and bitter book if he had not been a dying man
when he wrote it.

In the past decade, critics in large numbers have been drawn
to OrwelFs work and have found him for the most part a thorny
problem. The truth is that his work does not much lend itself to
theirs. His novels were direct and fairly simple narratives in an
old tradition. Their meanings are mostly on the surface. Orwell
posed no riddles, elaborated no myths, and manipulated no
symbols. Even Nineteen Eighty-Four offers limited possibilities
for exegesis. One need only be alive in the twentieth century to
grasp its significance. There is not much to do with OrwelFs
novels except read them. Nor is there much to be said about his
style. It was colloquial in diction and sinewy in construction;
it aimed at clarity and unobtrusiveness and achieved both. Cyril
Connolly once performed an experiment by scrambling some
sentences of Orwell's with some of Ernest Hemingway's and some
of Christopher Isherwood's. He defied the reader to tell the
writers one from another and argued that, since identification
was impossible, all writers who strive for the colloquial throw
away a good part of their heritage as writers. He felt that those
who worked in a Mandarin Dialect those, that Is, who strove
for elegance of phrase and exquisiteness of texture were at least
using all the resources of their language, while those who worked
in what he called the New Vernacular needlessly confined them
selves to a narrow range of rhythms and tones. I think Connolly
was wrong in saying that his three novelists could not be told
apart and wrong in his dispraise of colloquialism. But beyond
saying that Orwell's was simply the style most commonly used in
modern English and American writing and that Orwell em
ployed it with great vigor, there is really not a great deal for
a critic to say. A writer of Orwell's sort does not give the modern
critic much of a chance to draw upon his imposing collection of
critical utensils and contrivances.

ij$ The Importance of George Orwell

In consequence, there has been a search for the sources of
Orwell's strength In Orwell's character. No doubt that is where
the sources are to be found; le style est I'homme meme, and so
forth. But It cannot be said that the search has been very pro
ductive. What nearly everyone seems to find In Orwell Is recti
tude and more rectitude. Lionel Trilling has said that the
profoundest statement he ever heard about Orwell came from a
college student who said: "He was a virtuous man/* John Atkins
has said, "The common element In all George Orwell's writing
was a sense of decency." Atkins also calls him a "social saint."
The idea of salntliness turns up everywhere; there Is a touch
of hagiography even In the arguments directed against It. Irving
Howe, poking fun at the "old maids of criticism, hunting for
stray bits of morality as If they were pieces of tatting left In the
parlor" and pointing out that Orwell himself had said that
"sainthood is a thing human beings must avoid," has ventured
the opinion that Orwell was a "revolutionary personality." But
what Is that except another term, one with secular and socialist
overtones, for a saint? A "revolutionary personality" is what the
Ethical Culturist calls Jesus Christ.

Orwell was an uncommonly decent person, and his moral and
physical courage survived many hard tests. He was not a saint,
or even saintly. I do not think he was any more virtuous or de
cent than his contemporaries. What Is probably behind the use
of these terms Is a confusion of the prophet and the saint that
and an appreciation of the fact that Orwell saw through all the
pretenses of his time and never made a fool of himself. None of
this really has much to do with personal "goodness." On the con
trary, there is often a rather direct and visible relationship
between folly and purity of spirit. We all know about the paving
stones on the read to hell. "The surrendering and humbling of
the self breed pride and arrogance," Eric Hoffer has written, and
of course pride and arrogance breed folly. The obverse of this Is
the old set-a-thlef-to-catch-a-thief principle. It takes a certain
amount of wickedness to understand the mechanics of wickedness
as Orwell did and to perceive that "the essence of being human Is
that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing
to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 180

asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse im
possible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and
broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's
love upon other individuals/' I think it clear that Orwell's asceti
cism furnished him with a knowledge of the point to which asceti
cism should not be pushed and that his impulse toward fanaticism
furnished him with a comprehension of it and a determination
to resist it. Naturally, there was more than that to it, else he
would have succumbed to impulse.

In any event, Orwell had his share of wickedness. He could
say cruel things and his fairness of judgment did not always
extend to individuals. He called Kipling a "gutter patriot" and
W. H. Auden a "gutless Kipling." (He could be remorseful, too;
he publicly apologized for this characterization of Auden.) His
judgments were not always as charitable as they were sound;
there was a bit more to be said for the radical intellectuals of the
thirties than he could find it in his heart to say. I do not see
how, on logical grounds alone, he could be as indulgent as he
was toward P. G. Wodehouse and at the same time as bitter about
the liberals and radicals, to whom he had a way of referring as
"the pansy left." Standing alone, his plea for Wodehouse would
have seemed an act of generosity and understanding. But it seems
only fair that if one is going to excuse Wodehouse for allowing
himself to be exploited by the Nazis, one should be approxi
mately as forgiving to those who allowed themselves to be
exploited by the Communists. Orwell was quite frequently un
fair in this way, but his unfairness flowed not, I think, from
self-righteousness but from ill-temper, from his passion for the
truth, and, part of the time, from his use of overstatement as a
device of rhetoric. His choler and intemperance had something
in common with that of Dr. Johnson and with that of the author
of Gulliver's Travels, of whom he once wrote: "Politically, Swift
was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse
Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment."
It was Orwell's distinction that the follies of his friends never
drove him to abandon them, but now and then he did manage to
sound like the spokesmen for a perverse Toryism.

Orwell, thank God, was no saint. He was burdened by no

iBi The Importance of George Orwell

excess of purity. I do not think it within the province of the critic
to determine what properties of the pneuma account for what
we find in a man's work. It should be enough that we find some
thing to which we can respond and that we seek to understand
what it is that moves us. In Orwell, we find a mind that did not
have to be cleared of cant because it evidently had none to begin
with. He had sense and sensibility, a love of language, a nose
for fraud, a hunger for truth, a resolute heart, a robust and
inquiring intellect, and whatever it is that makes a man an artist.

Arthur Hays Vandenberg: New Man in
the Pantheon

1962

DEAN ACHESON has lately reminded us of the eminence of Arthur
H. Vandenberg, a Republican Senator from Michigan from 1928
until his death in 1951. "Without Vandenberg in the Senate/'
Acheson writes in Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known,
"the history of the postwar period might have been very differ
ent." Quite probably this is so. Acheson goes on: "Vandenberg
stands for the emergence of the United States into world power
and leadership, as Clay typified the growth of the country;
Webster and Calhoun the great debate of the ante-bellum days;
and Robert M. LaFollette the turbulence of the Progressive Era."
This puts him in fast company, but perhaps he belongs there.
He performed, according to Acheson, "a service for which this
country should forever be grateful."

Vandenberg's career was certainly an interesting and important
one. But, as now and then happens in this world, the things that
made it important were not the things that made it interesting.
Vandenberg was, even by the standards his contemporaries set, a
mediocrity. He was a nice, immensely likable mediocrity, to be
sure, and often an entertaining one, but his only gifts of conse
quence were for political survival, friendship, and the production
of prose that seemed to have been influenced chiefly by Mr.
Micawber and Sam Goldwyn. Yet there is no doubt that in Ms
later years he performed the services of a statesman. His story
teaches a rather stirring lesson in the political uses of rectified
error. It was Vandenberg's conversion, in the last days of the
182

jj Arthur Hays Vandenberg: New Man in the Pantheon

last war, from isolationism to Internationalism that made him a
large figure In the postwar world. Without Vandenberg's help,
It Is at least conceivable that Roosevelt and Truman might have
suffered the fate of Woodrow Wilson. Vandeoberg, a powerful
Republican leader in 1945, supported the Democratic administra
tions In most of our postwar policies among them, membership
In the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic
Treaty, the peacetime dispatch of American troops to Europe,
and the resistance In Korea. Before and even during the war, he
had been Isolationist. "This war Is about nothing but twenty-five
people and propaganda," he said not too long before Pearl
Harbor. He supported the war once we were in it, but on strictly
nationalist grounds. He opposed the nomination of either Dewey
or Willkie in 1944. His man was General MacArthur. But then,
on January 10, 1945, he took the Senate fioor and said, in one
of his typically overblown speeches, "No nation hereafter can
immunize Itself by Its own exclusive action/* This broke the
back of Republican isolationism In the Senate. It made Vanden
berg a central figure in the diplomacy and politics of the years
that remained to him. He gave the country a bipartisan foreign
policy which Vandenberg, a compulsive tinkerer with words,
said he preferred to describe as an "wnpartlsan policy/* (In
earlier days, he had said, "I am more Insulatlonist than isolation
ist. But If forced to elect between the designations Isolationist
and internationalist, I am proudly the former/*) He could not
have done this except as a recent convert. Dean Acheson would
not have accredited him to the pantheon if he had been an
Internationalist all along.

The conversion Itself was rather a commonplace affair. If one
wished to sail easily before the wind In 1945, one talked about
international co-operation, the community of nations, collective
security, the smallness and oneness of the globe, and all that sort
of thing. For politicians, especially Republican politicians, Inter
nationalism was the great success school of the period. The iso
lationists, like Representative Hamilton Fish, were being voted
or gerrymandered out of Congress. The prewar leader of the
movement, Senator Burton Wheeler, of Montana, was in disgrace
for having made some unsavory associations something Vanden-

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 184

berg, incidentally, never did. Wendell Willkie, Thomas E. Dewey,
and Harold Stassen were internationalists in one degree or an
other and doing very well at it, while in November 1944, Senator
Robert A. Taft, unregenerate as always, barely squeaked through
in Ohio. Eisenhower Republicanism was in the making. Vanden-
berg was unquestionably in earnest about seeing things in a new
light in January 1945, but he was lucky in having come upon
one of those delicious moments in life when self-interest and
conviction unite in urging the same course of action. He would
be up for re-election the following year, and both the inter
nationalist Republicans and the Democrats would have given
him a hard time if he had had to conduct a defensive, grousing
campaign as an isolationist. His change of heart made him, im
mediately, a national and international figure. He was able to
win re-election without making a single speech or even visiting
Michigan. He learned of his victory in 1946 while enjoying the
amenities (he was a great one for amenities) of the Hotel Meurice
on the Rue de Rivoli and lending powerful support to the
Secretary of State, James A. Byrnes, in his tangles with the
Russkis. Conversion led to a fascinating career and, it would
seem, immortality. If he had not had his blinding illumination,
he would be recalled today if he were recalled at all only as a
gassy and pompous Michigan politician whose saving graces
were an indefatigable friendliness and a talent for self-mimicry.
He was a windbag ("What is right? Where is justice? There let
America take her stand") who stood a certain distance apart
from others of the breed by virtue of his joviality and sweetness
of nature. He was one of the few men I have ever known whom
one could describe as inoffensively pompous. For one thing, he
was the sort of whom pomposity was expected he was big,
fleshy, jowly, well-looked-after. For another, he was the soul of
charity. In his diaries, which were published by his son in 1952
as The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg, he describes his
response to an extraordinary display of bad manners by President
Roosevelt and some members of his family. The Senator was at a
White House reception for the King and Queen of England.
He had lately been making Presidential noises. When it came his
turn to be presented to the King, Roosevelt did not introduce

jr#5 Arthur Hays Vandenberg; New Man in the Pantheon

him by name, as he had everyone else, but merely said, "Here's
a chap who thinks he's going to succeed me. But he isn't/' Two
of the Roosevelt boys, standing behind their father, doubled up
with mirth. Vandenberg's only comment was: "I was surprised
because the President is usually very charitable to me in his greet
ings. Perhaps he was trying to be funny." He gave everyone the
benefit of the doubt especially if it was possible to say they
were trying to be funny.

If he is to stand in history alongside the great igures of the
second rank, he will make an odd and amusing addition to their
company. He came to Washington in 1928 after two decades as
a small-city newspaperman and free-lance writer. The paper was
the Grand Rapids Herald , whose owner, and Vandenberg's pa
tron, was William Alden Smith, himself a Senator. As a writer,
he had turned out innumerable short stories in the Oliver Optic-
Horatio Alger vein for Eastern magazines and three dreadful
books about Alexander Hamilton, the best known of which is
Hamilton: The Greatest American. He combined with his Merry
Andrew nature a powerful hero-worshiping bent, and early in
life, he said, he had settled on Hamilton. "He stood at my
shoulder like a big brother in my youth," he once wrote. This
seems, at first glance, a somewhat astonishing assertion. Hamil
ton has not appealed to many boys. Why should the charitable,
easygoing Vandenberg have revered a believer in the knavery
of men? Actually, Vandenberg never grasped and never tried to
grasp Hamilton's view of life or his place in the history of
political theory. Of this side of Hamilton, he merely wrote: "To
epitomize his omniscient services the contributions of a Titan
would be impossible" and let it go at that. What he found in
Hamilton was an absorbing rags-to-riches saga, an exciting Tat
tered Tom or Ragged Dick story of the sort he was selling to
Pearson's. He wrote that there is nothing in American history
"more wonderful than the contrast between Hamilton, a friend
less immigrant upon the docks of Boston at the tender age of
fifteen and Hamilton, by sheer force of human intelligence, whip-
lashing a snarling New York convention majority into unwilling
acceptance of the Constitution at the age of thirty-one." When
Vandenberg was appointed to the Senate in 1928, he had one

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 186

aim he set above all others the erection on the banks of the
Potomac of a monument to Hamilton of a tonnage equal to, or
greater than, those that honor Washington and Lincoln.

In his early days, and to some extent later on too, he was a
combination hick and rou. He was a sort of Grand Rapids
boulevardier. He seemed hardly more serious about politics than
the Honorable Jimmy Walker, the song writer and soft-shoe
virtuoso who, during Vandenberg's first years in the Senate, was
mayor of New York. As a matter of fact, Vandenberg was also a
songwriter. He was the author of a popular ballad in praise of
the movie queen Bebe Daniels entitled "Bebe, Bebe, Bebe Be
Mine." This was the boulevardier. The small-town boy, a harness
maker's son, turned out editorial after editorial denouncing Sin
clair Lewis for Elmer Gantry and wrote a lengthy commentary
on the sordid Snyder-Gray murder case called "Sin and Justice
Both Naked." In the great days, toward the end, he was mostly
boulevardier. Having been a prohibitionist before Volstead and
bone dry as long as Prohibition lasted, he became a conspicuous
friend of the highball and a busy and quite charming ladies'
man. When history found an important role for him, he took
to the black Homburg as Douglas MacArthur took to gold braid
and handled his cigar with a new elegance. He was very im
pressive and very Senatorial in all the pictures of him talking
things over with Anthony Eden, Guy Mollet, Trygve Lie, the
King of Greece, and all the others.

As a writer, he could be faulted for many things, but he had
one endearing asset. He loved words in fact, he loved them al
most to death. He was very proud of having been called to duty
in the Republican campaign of 1920 and of being responsible
for the slogan "With Harding at the helm, we can sleep nights."
He was once asked if "Back to Normalcy" was his. "Normalcy,"
he said. "That sounds like one of my words." It surely did. A
man responsible for "sheer magicry" might be responsible for
anything. His love of words was of the purest, most elevated
sort; he loved them not just for their meanings but for themselves
alone. Who else could have come up with such phrases as "our
mirific inheritances," "pursuant to the pattern of the rapes of
yesterday/* "dream ourselves and others into delusions," "ex-

x8j Arthur Hays Wandgnberg: New Man in the Pantheon

tingulsh the jeopardy/* "marcescent monarchy/' and. "knock-out
admonition'? He was a lover not only of words but of punctua
tion. He worked Into everything an ungodly number of useless
quotation marks, exclamation points, parentheses, capitalizations,
and italics.

I have said that he would have been forgotten but for his
conversion in 1945- It can be argued, though, that his conversion
was entirely predictable. He was being converted all the time.
He could have found his way along the sawdust trail blindfolded.
(His "favorite Biblical character/' according to his son, "was St.
Paul, the dynamic convert to Christianity.") He came to the
Senate a conservative. But when he ran for re-election In 1934,
It was as a New Deal collaborationist. He had steered through
the Federal Bank Deposit Insurance Act and took all the credit
he could get for it. He described the Wagner Act, which he voted
against, as "labor's hard-won bill of rights." He coined a phrase:
"Soclal-mlndedness, not Socialism/* He wrote an article called
"The New Deal Must Be Salvaged." ("The New Deal must be
melted over, recast In a new engine, going slowly and rather on
the bias In several directions/*) It is worth noting that in 1954
he was one of two Republican Senators to make it. He picked up
In one election as much seniority as he might normally have
gained by winning two or three elections.

It is Inaccurate, or at least Incomplete, to describe him as hav
ing been, in the post-ig45 period, an Isolationlst-tumed-inter-
nationalist; It Is more nearly accurate, though still not com
pletely so, to describe him as an Intemationalist-turaed-isolatlon-
Ist-tumed-Internationalist. As editor of the Grand Rapids Herald
In 1916, he favored Intervention in Europe while Wilson and
Hughes were dead set against it. His prose had not attained Its
full lusciousness by then, but he was going pretty good, and he
wrote, close to thirty years before he had his blinding vision in
the Senate:

One right yielded up invites the loss of a second then a third. The

endless chain. Soon Infringements pyramid, and assailants, encouraged
by ease of unchallenged conquests, commence to plot against the na
tion itself. Somewhere a stand has to be made.

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 188

Once the stand was made, the war appeared to Vandenberg as
"the greatest revival the world has ever known since Christ came
upon the earth." The revival spirit cooled (as it always must
if it didn't, one revival would be enough), and by the time the
League of Nations fight came along, Vandenberg had turned
isolationist. This development may have had some connection
with the fact that the owner of the paper, Senator William Alden
Smith, took a stand against the League. Smith, a great contem
porary of Cut-Rate Carpenter and Rise-Up William Allen, had
not been conspicuous on any side of any issue up to 1919. His
most famous contribution was his raising of the question, during
the investigation of the Titanic disaster, of why the passengers
did not climb into the watertight compartments. But the League
of Nations somehow offended him, and he gave powerful sup
port to Henry Cabot Lodge's fight against it. The League of
fended Vandenberg, too, and in the days when he was pleased
with this phase of his record he talked a lot about an interview
he had with William Howard Taft. As an interviewer, as in all
his other roles, Vandenberg did most of the talking, and the
notable thing, according to him, about this encounter was that
he talked Taft right out of opposition to the Lodge amendments
to the League treaty and into support of them. Taft's switch,
he always maintained, was what really defeated Wilson. Vanden
berg also used to enjoy recalling that he made a contribution by
supplying Lodge with the sentence: "Unshared idealism is a
menace." Lodge used it, and it had, Vandenberg thought, great
impact.

He was isolationist pretty much throughout the thirties. He
cast one of the two votes against recognizing the Soviet Union.
He was a leading participant in Senator Gerald Nye's investiga
tion of the munitions makers. He said that testimony before this
committee persuaded him he had been in error in 1916. He
supported the Neutrality Act of 1937 and voted against the re
peal of its Arms Embargo in 1939. He went through a brief but
hot interventionist phase in the winter of 1939-40. He wanted to
put an immediate stop to the Russian invasion of Finland, and
he regarded the Japanese as a distinct menace. He was a sponsor
of the Senate resolution which abrogated the Japanese trade

i9 Arthur Hays Fandenberg: New Man in the Pantheon

treaty of 1911 a measure described by Walter Lippmann as "the
longest step on the road to war that the United States has taken
since President Wilson announced . . . that the United States
would hold the German government strictly accountable for its
acts." It was shortly after this, however, that he entered the
isolationist phase from which he did not emerge until 1945.
From the fall of France to Pearl Harbor, he was against every
thing the administration proposed. He supported the war but
continued to be isolationist. He opposed the Ball-Burton-Hatch-
Hill Resolution, which sought, in 1943, to commit the country
to a postwar United Nations. Then, just before the Dumbarton
Oaks conferences that were preliminary to the San Francisco
meeting at which the U.N. Charter was adopted, he made the
great speech. In his diaries, he says that he rewrote it "at least
a dozen times." It may be that each time he rewrote it, he found
room for one more use of the gorgeous tautology "honest can
dor," which appears a good dozen times, now and then rein
forced as in "honest candor devoid of prejudice or ire" and
"honest candor on the high plane of ideals." In the speech,
he announced that he had come to believe isolation impossible
and he put forth a program of sorts for the disarmament of
Germany by the victorious powers. What he had to say could
have been said in a few simple words. But those twelve revisions
led to the creation of a great mountain of platitudes, topped by
glittering redundancies:

We must have maximum Allied cooperation and minimum Allied fric
tions. . . . We cannot drift to victory. . . . There are critical moments
in the life of every nation. . . . We confront such a moment now. . . .
A global conflict which uproots the earth cannot submit itself to the
dominion of any finite mind. . . . Each of us can only speak according
to Ms little lights and pray for a composite wisdom that shall lead us
to high safe ground.

This is the indispensable point Our basic pledges [the Atlantic Charter]
cannot be dismissed as a mere nautical nimbus. They march with our
armies. They sail with our fleets. They fly with our eagles. They sleep
with our martyred dead. The first requisite of honest candor, I suggest,
Mr. President, is to relight this torch.

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES i 9 o

Our oceans have ceased to be moats which automatically protect our
ramparts. Flesh and blood now compete unequally with winged steel.
War has become an all-consuming juggernaut. If World War III ever
unhappily arrives, it will open new laboratories of death too horrible
to contemplate. I propose to do everything within my power to keep
those laboratories closed for keeps. We stand by our guns with epic
heroism. I know of no reason why we should not stand by our ideals.
... I do not wish to meddle. I want only to help. I want to do my
duty. It is in this spirit that I ask for honest candor in respect to our
ideals.

In Vandenberg's own modest words, "The electric effect of
the speech was instantaneous/' "It cannot be said of many speak
ers/' Walter Lippmann wrote, "that they affect the course of
events. But this can be said of Senator Vandenberg's speech if the
President . . . will recognize promptly and firmly its impor
tance." Roosevelt was no slouch in this matter. He took fifty re
prints along to Yalta and handed them out as promissory notes
from the Republican party. The speech sent Vandenberg to the
peaks immediately; it became practically impossible certainly
unofficial to hold an international conference without him.
His defection had made a repetition of 1919 impossible. If one
can imagine the devastation that would be wrought among right-
wingers today if Barry Goldwater defected and tagged along be
hind Dean Rusk everywhere Rusk went, one has some picture
of the devastation Vandenberg wrought by his famous switch.

Dean Acheson compares his role to that of Clay and Calhoun
in ante-bellum days. The analogy conceals the irony of the
situation. Clay and Calhoun were great controversialists and
they played unique historical roles. Vandenberg contributed only
his large and amiable presence. He never really did anything.
When he went to San Francisco, Moscow, London, Rome,
Geneva, or Rio, his function was to weaken Republican resist
ance in Washington and to prove to allies and adversaries that
we had something approaching national unity in this country.
He was a kind of property eagle. He could fulfill his function
without opening his mouth though he generally opened it quite
a bit. Still, many things might have been different, and worse,
if we had not had him.

jpz Arthur Hays Vandcnberg: New Man in the Pantheon

The moral of the Vandenberg story can be formulated in some
such fashion as this: It is very often better to be wrong first and
right afterward than to have been right all along. As Scripture
tells us, it makes a man more precious in the sight of the Lord,
Virtue is its own reward, but there is nothing that quite matches
the combination of virtue's reward and the wages of sin. There
are times when uprightness has practically no meaning unless it
rests firmly on the foundation of waywardness. Whittaker
Chambers might have ended in the near-anonymity of the
Time masthead if he had not been a spy; now there are those
who think of him as a modern St. Augustine. Vandenberg, in
his day, was far from being the only Republican internationalist
in the Senate. To name another, there was Warren Austin, of
Vermont. But Austin's record was grievously iawed: it contained
no recent isolationist phases. Truman made him ambassador to
the U.N. and he served with distinction, but there is no one to
propose that Clay, Calhoun, Webster, and La Follette move over
and make room for him.

But one cannot begrudge Vandenberg his place. He would
appreciate it greatly if he knew about it and would think of him
self as being much closer to Big Brother Alex Hamilton. And
his service was not small: what he did, by switching from isola
tionism to internationalism, was to make it possible, by a process
resembling vicarious atonement, for lots of other isolationists who
knew, if not that they were wrong, at least that they were licked
to make an honorable peace with the administration and thereby
to enable the country to have something like a workable foreign
policy.

Willkie, Another Happy Warrior

1953

JOSEPH BARNES' Willkie is an instrument of justice, restoring to
its subject some of the vitality, audacity, and firmness of char
acter that are not among the features our wayward memories
have fixed upon. Over the years, Willkie has shrunk to a symbol
of gullibility a windy, well-meaning, heavy-drinking promoter
who got religion and became a sap about it, allowing himself
to be hooked by the Stalinists into joining their mischievous
"second front" clamor and then promoting a credulous kind of
internationalism that, if it has not been the direct cause of any
damage in this badly damaged world, has been of little help in
advancing the hour of reason's triumph. Barnes rescues Willkie
from this sour and mistaken judgment. He does not claim much
for the "One World" phase the phase, incidentally, in which
Barnes was most closely associated with Willkie, having made
the global trip with him in an Air Force plane and having lent
a hand in the composition of One World but he does consider it,
as indeed he should, evidence that Willkie could respond to the
largest and most humane visions of his time and do it, despite all
his surface infelicities, with gallantry and grace. The One World
mission and Willkie's discourses on world politics may have been
defective in ideology, but they were beaux gestes of a sort that
no one else was then capable of making. (Mrs. Roosevelt was his
only rival in the field; her husband was much too canny, too
aware of political consequences, to do or say anything he could
not defend in terms of immediate interests, of either his party
or his nation. It is impossible to imagine Roosevelt undertaking
the legal defense of William Schneiderman, the California Com-

193 Willkie, Another Happy Warrior

munist boss whose right to citizenship Willkie gallantly upheld
before the Supreme Court.) What was appealing about Willkie,
what set him apart in his period, was not any doctrine or mode
of action he stood for but the fact that there was never any
meagemess about him. The earlier spokesmen of American
conservatism Coolidge, Hoover, Landon, and the rest were
shrewd, honest, and, in varying degrees, competent men, but
the truths they perceived were mostly in the cautionary line, a
series of "don'ts" and "bewares," Their views of life were in
variably reductive and depreciatory; when their language showed
any character at all, it was astringency. On most matters of sub
stance, particularly the structure of American society, Willkie's
outlook was about the same as theirs, but his gave the impression
of being surrounded by plenty of light, air, and good nature.
He was immensely likable.

He was not a great man, but he might, if things had worked
out a bit differently, have become one. He had courage, hope,
energy, curiosity, gregariousness, and flexibility. These were
things that Franklin Roosevelt had, but Willkie had, in addi
tion, a mind that was, if not of the first order, quicker than
Roosevelt's and better stocked; far from being intellectually lazy,
as Roosevelt was, he had a massive hunger for knowledge and
ideas and for the company of intellectuals. Roosevelt was the
craftier politician and the more experienced one, but Willkie
might in time have caught up with him. If he had had more
seasoning in the thirties, he might very well have won the elec
tion of 1940 and led the country through the war with Germany
and Japan. A number of people have recently expressed the view
that it might have been better all around if the political pendu
lum had made shorter strokes, so that the conflict with fascism
could have been managed by an antifascist government of the
Right and the developing conflict with Communism led by an
anti-Communist government of the left. But Willkie emerged
too late and died too early for any real fulfillment. His career
in public life lasted only four years. He will probably be remem
bered only for the freakishness of his career because although
he was doubly a Beelzebub in our political demonology, being
both a Wall Streeter and a power czar, he was looked upon by

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES x 9i

millions as a great democratic leader; because he was a registered
voter in one major political party only eighteen months before
he became the Presidential candidate of the other; and for a few
more such peculiarities. The late Harold Laski said that if a
man like Willkie turned up in European politics, it would be a
sure sign that the social system was about to collapse. Laski
claimed that the entire case for the viability of our political
system could be deduced from the facts of Willkie's career.
Laski had a weakness for large claims.

Still, Willkie should be remembered as more than an oddity.
It takes no labored analysis of recent events to make clear his
relevance to them. In thought and temperament, Eisenhower has
no more in common with Willkie than any middle-aged Kansan
has with any middle-aged Indianian, but Eisenhower's nomina
tion and, even more, his election can be read as a vindication of
Willkie's view of Republicanism and as a triumph for many
people whose imagination Willkie was the first to fire. Except
that Governor Dewey was a Warwick rather than a hopeful
prince, the 1952 Republican Convention was a repeat of the
1940 one, of which William Allen White wrote, "Taft has most
of the kingmakers, and Willkie has most of the enthusiasm."
Enthusiasm carried the day not because it captured the dele
gates but because, as happened in 1952, the delegates believed it
might capture the country. And the course of the campaign was
strikingly like Eisenhower's. "This is not a campaign/' Willkie
said at the outset. "It's a crusade." The crusade ended rather
squalidly. Willkie began as the antagonist of the party regulars
and as the candidate who would steal the enemy's thunder. He
held that Roosevelt was, if anything, too little of an inter
ventionist, though he expressed approval of most of the things
Roosevelt was doing. Candor and moderation were to be the
hallmarks of the campaign. There would be no concessions to
expediency. "I will not talk in quibbling language," he an
nounced. No huckstering was to be tolerated "I am purely a
conversational farmer," he said in Rushville the day after his
acceptance speech. "I have never done a stroke of work on a
Rush County farm in my life, and I hope I never have to."
But he was visited on the farm where "Louis Berkemier and

j^5 Willkie, Another Happy Warrior

Joe Kramer do the work/ 9 by some people who had a few things
to explain to him, among them the fact that there was another
man running for President. Wlllkle listened and was persuaded
that he might do well to alter his strategy, Roosevelt's destroyers-
for-bases deal with Churchill, which Willkie had endorsed,
became "the most dictatorial and arbitrary act of any President
In the history of the United States." By the time the campaign
was over, Willkie was as much in opposition to the man he had
been a few months earlier (and was once more to be a few
months later) as he was- to his opponent. He reversed his field
wherever it seemed profitable to do so, collaborated in just about
every form of humbug that promised a vote ("I have never lost
touch with the farm/' he began to say), and sought and made
alliances with the people for whom he had the greatest con
tempt.

All this, of course, enabled the Democrats to say, as they have
lately been saying of Eisenhower, that the candidate had given
himself to his enemies In the party. Having become the piper
for this set, he would have to pipe the tunes they called.
The argument is an old but spurious one, and Willkie's ex
perience is only one Instance of its falseness. After the campaign
his dislike of those he had denied his own instincts to satisfy was
greater by far than It had been before and greater, surely, than
it would have been if they had left him alone. It mounted
steadily over the years, so in the end he found It impossible to
choose between the politicians In his party and those in Roose
velt's, and he died without having decided whether he would
support Roosevelt In 1944 or would take a walk.

He died in full vigor and at the onset of what might have been
the most productive of his several careers. Had he lived, I think
he might have been one of the large figures of the postwar
period. I doubt If he would have sought a Presidential nomina
tion again (though It Is barely conceivable that the Republicans
would have pitted him against Truman In 1948), but he would
surely have had a lot to say about American politics, and he
would have been heard, for his partisans were as numerous and
as dedicated as, say, those of Adlai Stevenson. I got to know him
rather well in the last months of Ms life and to like him

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES i 9 6

enormously. I was a young political journalist, and he had a lot
of ideas he wished to see in print. I spent a good many amusing
and instructive hours in his Broad Street office drawing him out
(it was anything but difficult to do) on his views of men and
events. In those last months and weeks, he was filled with
resentment and scorn of Thomas E. Dewey, who had just beaten
him hands down for the Republican nomination, but, strangely,
he blamed his luck not on Dewey or fate but on, of all people,
John Foster Dulles. It pleased Willkie to think of Dewey as a
person of no consequence whatever as, in fact, a product of
Dulles' imagination. This conceit possessed him so that he
elaborated it into a theory of history that made John Foster,
Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State and Dulles' grandfather,
the author of the original sin. Foster had inflamed his grandson
with the desire to be Secretary of State. To satisfy this desire,
Dulles had first to create a President. He settled on Dewey,
became Dewey's leading patron, financed the early Dewey cam
paigns. In the summer and early fall of 1944, Willkie could
believe that the worst consequences of John Foster and his
grandson were about to be realized. (One can imagine him oppos
ing Eisenhower eight years later and elaborating still further
his eccentric theory of modern American history.)

I often wish that Willkie had lived into the world of Eisen
hower, the durable Dulles, Joseph R. McCarthy, Adlai Steven
son, and Richard M. Nixon. Defeat had liberated him from the
worst of his political passions as politics had earlier liberated
him from his business past. He was growing in eloquence and
sophistication. He was enjoying life Immensely. He had organized
a brilliant staff, and he had, of course, the money to finance any
activity he chose to undertake. His essential liberalism was being
strengthened I do not think he would have been a quixotic
one-worlder in the late forties and early fifties, but neither do I
think he would have bought the rival brand of bologna, which
was being peddled by dat old debbil Dulles. Whatever role he
might have played, he would have played It with charm and
verve and candor and generosity and a high sense of decency.

The Interior Ickes

1954

THE THREE PUBLISHED VOLUMES of Harold L. Ickes' Secret Diary
make the fullest and most Instructive of all Inside accounts of
the Roosevelt administration. Ickes is not just one more political
diarist, Interesting because strategically placed; he Is one of the
great journal-keepers, In at least some respects the peer of another
narcissistic bureaucrat, Samuel Pepys. As often as not, Ickes
deals with matters about which most of us nowadays could not
care less the late Ebert Burlew's opinion of the late James
Scrugham; the politics of public housing in Lackawanna, Penn
sylvania; the Senate vote on confirmation of a certain Hairy
Slattery as Under-Secretary of the Interior. Frequently, of course,
he gives us his version of some large and still meaningful event
the recognition of the U.S.S.R., or Roosevelt's fight over the
Supreme Court but the remote and trifling affairs far out
number the others. Ickes, however, generates an interest in
whatever he is writing about. He has fashioned a work that has
some of the attributes of creatlveness. His Washington, like
Dickens* London, Balzac's Paris, and Faulkner's Jefferson, is a
community in which one can settle down and lead a life of
one's own.

It is hard to say what makes Ickes so good. As a writer, he
lacked distinction. He had a commonplace mind, full of firmly
held, meritorious, wholly unoriginal views. Of sensibility, he
had none. "To contemplate nature/* he says in a passage that
takes him as close as he ever gets to reflectiveness, "magnificently
garbed as it is in this country, is to restore peace to the mind,
even if it does not make one realize how small and petty and

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES i 9 8

futile the human individual really is." He was celebrated as a
wit, but his mots were coarse, hoked-up stuff. What is so funny
about calling Wendell Willkie a "simple barefoot Wall Street
boy'? This gamy line was his most admired one and, as it
turns out, it was not even his. He got it from the newspaper
columnist Jay Franklin. But it could have been his. Other
admired observations were that Huey Long had "halitosis of the
intellect" and that Thomas E. Dewey had "thrown his diaper
in the ring." This sort of thing had doubled up his New Deal
colleagues and got under the opposition's skin, but politicians
are notorious for their puerile judgment and jejune tastes in
such matters. Ickes was a gagman, and not a very good one, even
by television standards. It is a negative virtue of the diary that
it Is very nearly jokeless. Contrived humor takes contriving, and
Ickes, dictating these entries at what must have been breakneck
speed, did not have the time for it, thanks be.

Ickes was not much of a writer, and he certainly was not
much of a human being. Indeed, the character one encounters
here Is so contemptible that one is forced to conclude that he
could not possibly have been as bad as he seems. Either that,
or he could not have seemed as bad as he was. Had he been as
disagreeable In the flesh as he is in the diary, no one could have
stood having him around. He was, by the testimony of these
pages, selfish, vindictive, suspicious, servile, and disloyal. Lust
for power ruled him. He loved no one and admired only those
who regularly bathed him in flattery or conferred on him some
portion of their authority. He wanted a large chunk of Henry
Wallace's power and all he could get of Harry Hopkins', and he
alternately praised and vilified both of them, praising when
their resistance was low, vilifying when it was high. Since no
one could make a career 'of gratifying Ickes, Ickes turned in the
end against everyone. By 1936, his only remaining friend Is
Cissy Patterson, the newspaper publisher. In the second volume,
he breaks with her. In 1933, he wrote, "I have a feeling of loyalty
and real affection for the President that I have never felt for any
other man." In 1936, after Roosevelt had declined to yield to
Ickes' latest plan for expanding the Department of the Interior,

jp^ The Interior I ekes

Ickes saw Roosevelt as a scoundrel. "Here Is a plain case of being
'sold down the river' by the President/* he wrote. Ickes could
rise ignobly above Ms feeling of betrayal. Ten days later, Roose
velt gave him a chance to deliver an important speech. "I told
him that I was willing to do anything that he wanted me to do,"
he wrote. He made the speech and then began to feel sorry for
himself because he had not abandoned the administration and
run against the President on the Republican ticket. "As I see the
thing now," he wrote on July 21, 1936, "in all probability I
could have won in November/' What utter madness! Some
self-seeking romancer had told him that he would make a fine
candidate and that the Republicans would leap at the chance to
get him. But he was always one to adjust and readjust his ambi
tions to the possibilities of the moment. By September, when it
was clear that Roosevelt was no flash in the pan, Ickes was ready
to settle down to another four years of sycophancy. He liked
winners, and besides, J. David Stem, a White House emissary,
had told him that "I was the outstanding man in the administra
tion and a tower of strength to the President."

He was over the most virulent form of Potomac fever after the
Democratic convention of 1936, but a lower-grade infection
struck in 1940, the year in which Roosevelt insisted upon the
Vice-Presidential nomination for Henry Wallace. A few weeks
before the convention he started a Vice-Presidential boom for
himself. He tells how on July 16, 1940 a group of Connecticut
Democrats had called upon him to discuss matters in his Chicago
hotel room early in the convention.

. . . They came in to discuss the Vice-Presidential situation. I told
them all that I knew, which was nothing. They suggested that Henry
Wallace would be a good candidate, and I agreed with them, although
I did remark that he wasn't a particularly good campaigner and that,
with the President tied up in Washington during the coming campaign,
it would be necessary for our Vice-Presidential candidate to take
Willkie on. Then [Representative William] Citron said, "I think that
you would make a good Vice-president/* I thanked Mm. The others
seemed to fall in with the idea and said they could deliver Connecticut
to me. All of them demanded my autographed photograph, which I
promised to send them from Washington.

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 200

Some of his friends sounded out the California delegation,
which was, according to Ickes, solidly for him, excepting only
Representative Jerry Voorhis, the man who in 1946 was retired
from politics by Richard M. Nixon. Voorhis was a dedicated
liberal and one of the most intelligent men in Washington. But
he opposed Ickes, who wrote: "Voorhis can always be depended
upon to develop some half-baked idea. I have long held his
judgment in contempt." Meanwhile, Roosevelt let it be known
that he wanted Wallace, and he said he would not run if anyone
else were nominated. The Ickes bubble burst. Governor Culbert
L. Olson, of California, whom Ickes supposed to be the leading
Ickes man in the convention, nominated Henry Wallace. But
Ickes can still write, "If . . . early in the balloting a big block
of votes had been cast for me, it is to be doubted whether Henry
could have been nominated even with the President's support/'
And then an absolutely extraordinary thought struck the diarist:

It occurred to me that he [the President] might purposely be allowing
a situation to develop in which he could with good grace decline the
nomination. . . . Who knows but that the President could have wel
comed this? Who can say that he forced the bitter pill of Wallace in
the final hope that the convention would not swallow it . . . ? No?
The whole thing is very obscure and confusing. ... I am reminded
that Jim Farley said to me over the telephone on Thursday that he
would listen with interest to my speeches during the campaign lauding
Wallace.

There was simply no end to his pettiness and vindictiveness.
He says of his part in a controversy with General Hugh Johnson,
"When I did get back at him, I tried to hurt as much as I could."
Yet his very disagreeableness throws some sharp light on affairs
of state:

Yesterday I got my bill from Mrs. [Cordell] Hull for my share of
the Cabinet dinner to the President and Mrs. Roosevelt and it was
$78.75. ... I suppose that I resent it particularly because part of this
money was to help feed the Vice-President and the Speaker of the
House with their respective spouses. Next year I do not intend, at
least without protest, to permit the Hulls or anyone else to invite
guests without my consent to a dinner at which I am a joint host. Not

2or The Interior Ickes

only was the dinner this year the most expensive that we have had,
it was the poorest

And he relates the unpleasant with a candor possessed by no
other New Deal memoirist:

The President told Miss [Frances] Perkins that he would be happy
if she could discover that Boake Carter, the columnist and radio com
mentator, who has been so unfair and pestiferous, was not entitled to be
in this country. It appears that an investigation of his record is being
made.

On May 6, 1939, Idces wrote, "As I told Tom Corcoran,
yesterday, the chances are today eighty out of one hundred that
I will be resigning shortly. My morale is ... at such a low ebb.
. . . For the President arbitrarily and without even discussing
the matter with me, to deprive me of so many of the powers that
I have exercised is bad enough but what has cut me deeply is
the manner of his proceeding/' Ickes, who was of course the one
man to last through all the Roosevelt administrations and into
Truman's first, was piqued because Roosevelt had dictated some
appointments to him. Exactly a week later, Ickes wrote:

I lunched with the President on Thursday, and I kidded him a good
deal about Forestry and Agriculture. Just what he will do with Forestry
in the end I do not know, but I am going to keep after him, both
directly and indirectly. Now that I have Fisheries and Biological Survey,
it ought to make Forestry easier. I told him that he had made one
great mistake; that coal was decayed vegetable matter, that it repre
sented a chemical change in fallen trees and that trees were growing
crops. . . . [And] I told him that in my judgement sending Rural
Electrification to Agriculture was the same kind of mistake that had
been made originally when the Bureau of Public Roads was set up in
Agriculture. I pointed out that Rural Electrification involved the build
ing of transmission lines and the selling of electric current. ... I
think I won him pretty far over to my theory that all of the agencies
having to do with public power, including the TVA, ought to be set
up in one strong agency in Interior.

It seems never to have occurred to Ickes that there was any
thing unwholesome about has appetite for power or flattery.

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 202

Nor, though he was ordinarily suspicious o the entire human
race, did it ever occur to him that flatterers might be ignobly
motivated. When Frederic A. Delano, the President's uncle, told
him "how much he admired my ability, integrity, and intellectual
honesty," Ickes set it down as though it were a report on weather
conditions, a statement of plainly observable fact that no one
could have any possible interest in misrepresenting. And again:
"Felix [Mr. Justice Frankfurter] told me that next to the
President I was the one man in the country who stood for a
better civilization and whose voice carried farthest in behalf of
a civilized way of living." It may be that the very grossness of his
nature is one of the things that made him an exciting diarist. It
helped him, perhaps, to order his world and bring his characters
into a single, clear focus. The amassing of grievances, the slow
spreading of his hatreds, give point and a kind of plot to this
portrait of a sprawling agglomeration of people in most of whom,
as individuals, our interest cannot be great. Each Burlew and
each Scrugham is involved in either furthering Ickes* ambition
or in blocking it, and we have a continuing interest in seeing
when and for what reason they will become characters in the
Ickes demonology. For while Ickes could bear frustration in
great quantities, he did suffer as a result of his need to hate. He
solicited praise and power with the brazen, businesslike air of a
streetwalker on the prowl for clients, but he did develop a bad
conscience about the number of people it was becoming neces
sary to despise. He stayed awake nights thinking how terrible it
was that there were so many ranged against him: "A heavy
barrage is being laid down to break my morale. ... I am
thoroughly persuaded that there is an active cabal working
against me." He became addicted to soporifics, massive nightcaps,
and driving through the countryside at ninety miles an hour.
"Life simply can't go on on the basis of continued and implacable
resentments," he wrote. But it did go on.

In his apparent innocence of the nature of corruption, Ickes
calmly bequeathed us a self-portrait of a man corrupt in the
deepest sense. But it is not the likeness of the portrait that makes
it so striking; it is, on the contrary, its almost total lack of cor
respondence to reality. Ickes was the embodiment of a stunning

2oj The Interior I ekes

paradox; lie was corrupt on the Inside and pure as the driven
snow on the outside. His outer purity was no pose; It was a fact,
a condition, and If it were not for this diary the evil that he did
would not have lived after him. But there Is no proof that he did
any evil. None of the countless post-mortems on the Roosevelt
administration have brought to light a single Instance of Ickes
abandoning the public interest. (The diary reveals only one. He
mentions his support of a federal grant for the Queens MIdtown
Tunnel and says, "The reason I was so strongly in favor of this
is because Senator [Robert F.j Wagner wants It badly.") Generally
speaking, he was, in matters bearing on the common welfare, as
straight as a die. The President's uncle may or may not have
been speaking from the heart when he commended Ickes for
his "ability, Integrity, and Intellectual honesty," but It was a
judgment any reasonable man could have made if he had gone
solely by the record. No scandal ever touched Ickes, and he was
perhaps the best administrator Roosevelt had. The only clouds
that darken his memory are those he sketched in himself in this
remarkable diary.

Those volumes will stand as his most imposing monument.
The self-portrait is repellent, but it is vivid and memorable. In
fact, almost every virtue of the book seems attributable to some
defect In its author's character. His candor was the product of
his Indelicacy. Being a schemer, he had need for information on
those around him. Literal-minded, uninterested in ideas for their
own sake, he found self-expression in a simple transcription of
the intelligence he received what was said at this dinner party,
what was done at this conference, this Cabinet meeting, this
poker game. The Secret Diary brings to life a Washington in
which a social revolution is being engineered, but it would, one
imagines, be hardly less absorbing if it dealt with the administra
tion of Mlllard Fillmore.

The Contrarieties of Ezra Pound

In the spring of 195*] 3 the editors of Esquire asked me to write
an article on Ezra Pound. In the back of their minds, and of
mine,, was the idea of saying something that might create a new
interest in the case and perhaps help get him out of St. Elizabeths
Hospital. It has been said that the article, which appeared in
September 1957, did play a party and I like to think this is so.
What was more important, however, was the initiative of the
magazine's editors in soliciting letters commenting on the article
and on the "case" from a large number of other writers among
them Marianne Moore, Van Wyck Brooks, Osbert Sitwell, John
Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wilbur, Robert
Graves, Norman Mailer, Mark Schorer, and Babette Deutsch.
Their letters were published in Esquire over a period of three
months and were used, as was my piece, by Pound's counsel,
Thurman Arnold, who is perhaps the only lawyer ever to have a
brief (the Pound one) rewritten by Robert Frost. A circumstance
that helped greatly in getting Pound sprung was a change in the
federal rule on insanity defenses; the old McNaghten's Rule,
which held that a man could not plead insanity if he had been
aware of the legal and moral consequences of his acts at the time
of their commission, was replaced in federal courts by the doctrine
that, to summarize briefly, a man could not be convicted of a
crime if the crime was the product of his aberrations. For so long
as this doctrine held, it would almost certainly have been im
possible to prove Pound guilty. Anyway, on April 18, 1958, the
charges against Pound were dismissed by Chief Judge Bolitha /.
Laws of the Federal District Court in Washington. The Depart-
204

205 The Contrarieties of Ezra Pound

ment of Justice had requested their dismissal after, its representa
tives said, being advised by psychiatrists that Pound would never
be competent to stand trial and would be harmless if released.

Pound had refused to see me while I was doing the article. I
suppose he assumed it would be hostile. After he saw an advance
copy, however, he sent me a paperback Selected Poems with an
inscription scrawled over the first three pages. I deciphered it as
follows:

No bloke with a papal name shows benevolence for which my
thanks. He neglected a few bits of homework, vide p. VIII
(not p. 8.) One quote without context could be correlated with
senate investigation of labor racketeering and European ef
forts to deal with that problem.

R.H.R.
from

IT WOULD BE HARD to name a living man who embodies more
polarities of mind, temperament, and function than Ezra Pound,
the poet, scholar, and sometime reformer who has spent the last
twelve of his seventy-two years confined, as certifiably insane, in
St. Elizabeths Hospital, the huge asylum maintained by the
federal government on a rise of land in the southeast corner of
Washington.

This inmate is one of the great champions and liberators of
the modern spirit; he is also a crackpot poisoner of the well of
opinion a political crank who has proceeded from funny-money
theories to a full-blown chauvinism. This xenophobe Pound is
one of the truly cosmopolitan figures of the century as the
pre-eminent translator of his time, he has been a heroic builder
of bridges to other civilizations; there is, however, a chamber of
his poet's soul in which a yahoo dwells a buckwheat oaf sound
ing off like a Kleagle of the Klavern or a New York street-brawler
back in the days of the Christian Front. This cosmopolitan Pound
is a true patriot he has a love for the United States that is
genuine and affecting and that has had a great deal to do with
the making of American culture over the last fifty years; yet he
has been, since November 26, 1945, under indictment for nineteen

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 206

separate counts of treason the charge growing out of the un-
contested fact that he made propaganda broadcasts for the fascist
enemy from the enemy's camp in wartime.

In Ezra Pound's extraordinary person, the antipodal qualities
clang and clatter, the denial crowds the affirmation, antithesis is
always on the heels of thesis. Throughout his life, he has esteemed
the Confucian ideal of order, and much of his work reflects it;
yet his life and his work, taken as a whole, are sheer chaos
though sometimes a glorious chaos, as in what William Butler
Yeats called the "stammering confusion" of the Cantos, the most
imposing of all his work. This great man has stood at once for
love and for hate, for friendship and for misanthropy, for reason
and for befuddlement, for unexampled purity and for pure
muck, for luminous spirits like Yeats and Robert Frost and for
deranged ones like Benito Mussolini and for fanatics like John
Kasper, the muddled youth who recently was denied appeal of a
one-year sentence for contempt of court committed in the after
math of his efforts, undertaken a year or so ago largely, he says,
at Ezra Pound's encouragement to stir the lily-white animals
to riot and bloodshed in defense of segregation in the South.

In the world as Pound, in his better moments, wants it, first
things would be first, and the first thing about him is that he is
a great poet. It is by no means certain, though, that he or we can
have it that way. The object of public interest today, of syn
dicated newspaper articles and comment in the mass-circulation
magazines, is Pound the crazy writer who appears in relationship
to the White Citizens Councils and the general revival of Kluxery
to be somewhat as Lenin was to the Bolsheviks before 1917. The
comparison is, of course, absurd, and probably the connection
between Pound and Kasper is not everything that young Mr.
Kasper, hungering for a god and perhaps for a father, claims it to
be. The White Citizens Councils should not be hung around
Pound's neck simply on John Rasper's say-so. The records of
St. Elizabeths Hospital reveal no more than a half-dozen visits by
Kasper to Pound, and though there may have been more, no
number of visits would constitute acceptable evidence of Pound's
direct responsibility. The shrine is not to be blamed for every
thing the pilgrim does and is. There is bigotry in Ezra Pound,

zoj The Contrarieties of Ezra Pound

and that is bad enough, but in justice it has to be acknowledged
that he has never been known to address himself to the question
of public-school integration. Still, the world does have a way,
sometimes, of putting last, or secondary, things first, and to the
world at the moment Pound is the inmate, the mental patient,
the poet-writer who once committed treason or something and
who now appears to be tied up with Kasper, the race agitator.

The world's way is to be noted but not in all cases, and
certainly not in such cases as this, followed. The main thing about
Ezra Pound is that he is a poet of towering gifts and attainments.
Poetry is not a horse race or any other sort of competition, and
it is silly to argue over which poet runs the fastest, jumps the
highest, or dives the deepest. Still, a respectable case could be
made out to the effect that the century has produced no talent
larger or more fecund than Pound's. Certainly the fit comparisons
would be with no more than half a dozen other men who write in
English. These, as the reigning critics see the matter today, would
be T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Frost (some dissent here, probably), W. H.
Auden, and Dylan Thomas; later on, some of these names may
be removed and replaced by some from the second rank, such as
Wallace Stevens, Robert Graves, Walter de la Mare, Marianne
Moore, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Robert
Lowell.

Pound's position is secure, not only because of the power of
his own work but because of his service as a midwife to genius
and as an influence on other poets. Not long ago, the government
which detains Pound in St. Elizabeths circulated abroad, as part
of its effort to persuade the world that we Americans really care
about the finer things, a flossy periodical in which it was asserted
that Ezra Pound "has done more to serve the cause of English
poetry than anyone else alive." (The article, by Hayden Carruth,
a gifted critic, also said, "It is hard to think of a good reason why
Pound should not have his freedom immediately.") The state
ment on his service is broad but difficult to gainsay. Of the poets
of comparable stature, at least half have at one time or another
been Pound's disciples; others were greatly aided by him. The
best-known and most influential poem of our time, Eliot's The
Waste Land, took the shape in which the world knows it under his

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 208

expert hand. Eliot submitted it to Pound at many stages, and In
its penultimate stage it was, according to Eliot, "a sprawling,
chaotic poem . . . which left Pound's hands, reduced to about
half its size, in the form in which it appears in print." The dedica
tion of The Waste Land reads, "For Ezra Pound il miglior
fabbro" Pound deeply influenced Yeats in the later phases of
Yeats' career. But for Pound, the recognition of Robert Frost
would have come more belatedly than it did. It was Pound who
first got Frost published in the United States and Pound also who
found a London publisher for James Joyce. Amy Lowell, E. E.
Cuinmings, and William Carlos Williams sat, often in extreme
discomfort, at his feet. W. H. Auden is of a later generation, but
he has asserted that "there are few living poets . . . who could
say, 'My work would be exactly the same if Mr. Pound had never
lived/ "

And all of this influencing and literary politicking in addition
to his own work: it is now just short of fifty years since the
publication of his first book, A Lume Spento, and the flame is
still bright and hot. He began with a rage to "purify the language
of the tribe" and to make that purified language part of the stuff
of life itself. Poetry was to be existence, not about existence.
"Poetry is ... as much 'criticism of life* as red-hot iron is a
criticism of fire." The age, he said, in one of his most famous
poems:

. . . demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries

Of the inward gaze;

Better mendacities

Than the classics in paraphrase!

A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

He provided for the age what he thought it demanded volume
upon volume of poetry, some of incomparable loveliness, some of

j2op The Contrarieties of Ezra Pound

unexcelled ugliness, and much besides. And he still does. In these
last few melancholy years, many magical and magnificent things
have gone out to the world from his bedlam in Washington. He
has pressed forward with his Cantos, with his criticism, and with
his Indefatigable labors of translation, the latest fruit of which
Is a stunning version of Sophocles' Trachiniae. If the New York
Herald Tribune now sees his wretched quarters in Anacostia
as the place where young men like John Kasper are corrupted,
others may some day compare them with the cells In which
Cervantes wrote Don Quixote or Bunyan Pilgrim's Progress.

But Pound Is alive and controversial in our world and much
too thorny a subject to be dealt with only in terms of his major
work. His madness, if it exists, will not be exorcised by his verses
any more than his verses can be hidden under his madness.
Poetry, one can begin by saying, Is, among other things, an act
of the controlled intelligence. This is particularly true in the
case of Pound, who has never failed to demand of himself and of
his work cool, hard, purposeful thought, and who has, addi
tionally, an analytical mind of immense power. However, a con
trolled and discriminating intelligence is not a sure defense
against insanity. Both madness and genius can be spasmodic or
simultaneous in a compartmented being like Pound.

The question of whether Pound is insane by any acceptable
legal or psychiatric definition is a vexed one. Reputable authori
ties disagree. Four psychiatrists, one of them appointed by
Pound's counsel, filed a unanimous report which led to his com
mitment to St. Elizabeths, sparing the defendant and the country
the pain of a trial for a capital offense. But some doctors have
maintained that Pound is quite a long way from being Insane by
the standards that court examiners are compelled to use and that
justice was jobbed when Pound went to the hospital rather than
to the gallows. From the layman's point of view, the matter is a
good deal simpler. Whether Pound meets the legal and institu
tional tests for a criminally inculpable and confinable psychotic
and it seems highly doubtful that he does he is a pathological
personality who has, by the reasonable standards of most rea
sonable men, lost contact with reality at many crucial points. In
the vernacular, he is off his rocker or if he isn't, the rest of us

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 210

are off ours. The paranoid's delusions, Ms morbid suspicions,
his view of life as a conspiracy are all apparent, even in the
fine poetry, which more and more over the last twenty-five years
has dealt with Pound's political and economic obsessions. In
Pound, those suspicions and delusions are evidence of mania.
For a village eccentric to assert that Franklin Roosevelt was a
tool of international Jewry, that we got into World War II
because of a crooked financial deal pulled off by Roosevelt and
Henry Morgenthau, that all world history would be changed if
Martin Van Buren's autobiography had been published a few
years sooner than it was all this would not be conclusive proof
of insanity. Such beliefs may merely show misguidance. But it is
quite another thing for a man of Pound's cultivation to believe
them and to make them the stuff of his poetry.

Since the onset of the great depression, Pound has been making
silk purses from sows' ears. His major theme as distinct from
the secondary and supporting themes involving Roosevelt and
Morgenthau and Van Buren has been that mankind's troubles,
all of them, are traceable to the hiring out of money at interest
("the beast with a hundred legs, USURA") by commercial lenders
("every bank of discount is downright corruption/every bank of
discount is downright iniquity") and that life on earth would be
sweet and noble and aesthetically rich if we had the wisdom to
adopt the fiscal reforms advocated by Silvio Gesell, Major G. H.
Douglas, and other hopeful currency tinkerers. These are his
political convictions as well as the meat of his poetry, and since
when, asks Dr. Frederic Wertham, one of the dissenting psy
chiatrists, has a political conviction, however aberrant, been
regarded as proof of paranoia? The answer the layman can give,
without attempting to satisfy either psychiatry or law, is that
a political conviction is lunatic when it leads a man to tell a
friend, as Pound once told William Carlos Williams, that at a
given moment he preferred the sanctuary of St. Elizabeths to the
world beyond its Nichols Avenue gates, where he believed he
would be shot by agents of the "international crew."

The obsessions make him see the surface of life in a world that
endures usury as "infinite pus flakes, scabs of a lasting pox," and
the flux of life in this motion:

2ii The Contrarieties of Ezra Pound

as the earth moves, the centre

passes over all parts In succession
a continual bum-belch

distributing its production

Still, the purses are silk beyond all cavil or dispute:

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man

Made courage or made order, or made grace

Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry
Pull down thy vanity,

Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.

It is characteristic of the great egotists to have little traffic with
their own years of innocence and learning. When they deal with
the period at all, they are likely to follow the example of Rousseau
and foreshorten and revise experience in such a way as to make
worldliness follow directly upon infancy. Pound is of the classic
breed though not, as it happens, in any other way a brother to
Rousseau. One cannot accuse him of selfishness or of excessive
self-portraiture; his ego has asserted itself massively, in cock-
sureness, in literary and political arrogance, in conceits of dress
such as red velvet robes and conceits of leadership such as walk
ing one pace ahead of his followers in every procession, and, in
these later years, in his paranoid delusions about the malign
sources of the world's resistance to his remedies. This kind of
self-concern has led him to consider himself and his life at great
length, to record his own comings and goings, to preserve the
least of his obiter dicta, and to reflect in hundreds of thousands
of words on the meaning of his own strange journey.

Yet the shaping years are nowhere dealt with. In every auto
biographical statement, the infant born in Hailey, Idaho, in
1885, the son of Homer and Isabel Weston Pound, becomes in a
sentence or two a central figure in American letters. Idaho could
have influenced him not at all, for in 1887 the family moved to
Wyncotte, Pennsylvania, and Pound's father took up his duties

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 212

as assayer of the United States Mint at Philadelphia. It is clear
from a handful of letters to his parents, published a few years
ago in his collected correspondence, that they were bookish,
serious-minded people. His mother, who was somehow related to
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was a musician of sorts, and his
father had a lively and informed interest in contemporary litera
ture. Does the fact that Pound's father had a professional concern
with the value of currency explain Pound's obsession to any
degree? This has been rumored, but Pound himself has cast no
light upon it. All that is really known of him in the early years
is that he survived.

He was a gifted child and entered the University of Penn
sylvania at fifteen. From this point on, he is not reticent in deal
ing with experience, but neither, one suspects, is he particularly
reliable. He paints himself as an enormously learned young man,
which he no doubt was, and as an enormously sophisticated one,
which he evidently was not. He did not enroll as a regular
undergraduate at Pennsylvania. He wanted no truck with most
of what they had to teach, so he was a "special student," working
mostly in languages. He claims to have had contempt for most of
his teachers and for most of his fellow students. Yet there are
contemporaries who remember him as a boy, gangling and shy
and humiliated by his life under a carpet of bright red hair, who
was terribly eager for acceptance and who, indeed, was so eager
to be pledged to a fraternity that, when he was finally rebuffed,
he transferred to Hamilton College. The story may be untrue;
it all happened in another world anyway, and memories are not
all they might be. But the quality of memories counts. William
Carlos Williams, a medical student at Pennsylvania at the time,
has the recollection that when Pound thought the moment had
at last arrived to try his luck at picking up a girl, he implored
Williams to come along for protection.

At all odds, Pound did transfer to Hamilton, where he took
prescribed courses and in 1905 was awarded a degree. After
Hamilton, he went back to Pennsylvania and got a master's
degree. (It is curious that in a one-page autobiography prepared
for his Selected Poems in 1949, Pound, wlnle skipping over some
of the principal episodes in his life, should have listed three

2/5 The Contrarieties of Ezra Pound

academic degrees, two earned, from Hamilton and Pennsylvania,
and an honorary Litt. D. from Hamilton in 1939. Before 1939,
he had been writing of American universities as nothing but
fancy beaneries. In April 1929, he advised the Alumni Secretary
of the University of Pennsylvania that "All the U. of P. or your
god damn college or any other god damn American college does
or will do for a man of letters is to ask him to go away without
breaking the silence." It was a different story when Hamilton
asked the man of letters to accept its recognition. Among his
many dualities are a contempt for authority and an almost
sickening respect for it. When he lived in Italy, he had embossed
on his stationery a gamy platitude from Mussolini "Liberty is
not a right but a duty.") In those student years, he wrote some of
the poems that were to appear in his first book in 1908. It would
be interesting, at least from the viewpoint of the gossip that
lurks in each of us, to know how close he was to the trembling
adolescent recalled by Williams and how far from this, which is
from the period:

For I was a gaunt, grave councillor
Being in all things wise, and very old,
But I have put aside this folly and the cold
That old age weareth for a cloak.

I was quite strong at least they said so
The young men at the sword-play. . . .

Pound had tried out for the fencing team at Pennsylvania.

Poems are bom of hopes and imaginings, and so long as Pound
had these within him, as he did in wild abundance, it should
matter little to anyone save those in a position to offer therapy
what else he was in that faraway time. After Philadelphia, he
traveled abroad for a year, in Italy, Spain, and Provence, and
then accepted an instructorship at Wabash College, in Indiana.
Within a few months of his appointment, he was asked to resign,
which he did. His story is that he had invited to his lodgings a
penniless girl, stranded from a burlesque show, whom he had
found on the streets of the town while going out in a raging
blizzard to mail a letter. He claimed that he had been stirred by

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 214

nothing more than an impulse to hospitality, and in the centen
nial history of the college, the authorities, eager to reclaim a
genius, explained that the girl slept chastely in Pound's bed and
Pound on the floor. It sounds plausible, but it scarcely matters.
Pound's landlady discovered her. The college providentially
booted him, and he returned to Europe, there to remain, except
when he returned for his honorary Litt. D., until he was flown to
Washington as a prisoner under armed guard on November 18,

"London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy" thus
Pound, to a stay-at-home friend on February 3, 1909. London was
the place for Pound or, at any rate, a place. It is difficult to
believe that his awesome energies were greatly dependent on
environment. At all odds, he pursued poesy; he gave it chase
like a Nimrod being shot at from the rear. It is doubtful if any
other American writer ever knew a period as fertile as the decade
that followed Pound's move to London. He produced his finest
half-dozen volumes of poetry, quite enough to sustain his reputa
tion. ("Thirty pages are enough for any of us to leave/' he once
wrote. "There is scarce more of Catullus or Villon." There are
perhaps a thousand pages of Pound's own poetry, with more
coming all the time.) He translated: from medieval French,
from Latin, from Greek, and from Chinese and Japanese, which
he could not read but which he nevertheless rendered from the
literal translations of Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, an American
Orientalist who had taught philosophy at the Imperial Normal
School in Tokyo and who made Pound his executor. He was
the European editor of P.oetry, the Chicago magazine which
Harriet Monroe, a noble dilettante lady, offered this Philistine
republic as "a place of refuge, a green isle in the sea, where
Beauty may plant her gardens." He dug up Frost and Eliot for
the magazine; he pestered established British writers for manu
scripts. He got Wyndham Lewis, John Masefield, Ford Madox
Ford, Rabindranath Tagore. He and Amy Lowell put their
heads together, a consummation blessed by T. E. Hulme, a
British philosopher with poetic leanings, and produced Imagism,
a school. The doctrine was that poetic images should not be
adornments but the guts of the work itself. The language, in

2/5 The Contrarieties of Ezra Pound

Hulme's words, was to be "cheerful, dry and sophisticated/* or,
in Pound's single word, "perfect." "It stands," he said, amplify
ing, "for hard, clear edges." And the best of it did have hard,
clear edges; sometimes, though, the quest for perfection was
destructive; the individual poem was lightened and hardened
to the point where it was fleshless and boneless. Once Pound had
the thought of describing some faces he had looked upon in the
Paris M^tro. He wrote a poem of thirty lines. It seemed rather
fatty to him, so he put it aside, while he awaited further light
on the problem. After a time, he went over it and cut it to
fiiteen lines. Still imperfect. He put it away again for a year or
so, and then did some drastic surgery, so that the poem, called
In a Station of the Metro, now reads, in its entirety:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Pound soon abandoned the school in favor of one he called
Vorticism, which he proclaimed as vastly superior. He was alone
in grasping the distinction; if there was one, it did not show in
his work, in which he continued to make breath-taking ap
proaches to perfection.

"Dear Miss Lowell," Pound wrote in November 1913, *'I agree
with you . . . that 'Harriet' is a bloody fool. Also I've resigned
from Poetry in Hueffer's (Ford Madox Ford's) favor, but I
believe he has resigned in mine. . . ." It was this sort of thing
down through the years. Imagism to Vorticism and on along to
Social Credit and Gesellism, thence to fascism. And from Poetry
to BLAST, the official Vorticist organ, which had no bang at all
and petered out in two issues, and back to Poetry and on to The
Egoist and The Little Review. In between and amongst these,
there were side enthusiasms the music of George Antheil and
Arnold Dolmetsch, the sculpture of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
Pound learned to play the bassoon and for a time fancied him
self a composer. He was everlastingly transient. It was not for
long that London was good for poesy. By 1913, England was "this
stupid little island . . . dead as mutton." After the war, he
moved to Paris accompanied by the wife he had acquired in
London, Dorothy Shakespear, who lives today in the wastes of

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 216

southeast Washington and never misses a visiting period at St.
Elizabeths. And a few years after that to Rapallo, on the Italian
Riviera.

"One has to keep going East," he told Mary Colum, "to keep
one's mind alive." Any direction would have done, for it was
really a matter of the restlessness of the literary plotter and
organizer of movements. As Robert Graves saw it, "Slowly the
frustrated Pound went mad-dog and bit the other dogs of his day;
he even fastened his teeth in Yeats' hand, the hand that had fed
him/* This is too dour a picture of it. Pound was not, at bottom,
disloyal. Indeed, even in his present madness, he remains fast to
many of his oldest friends and his oldest principles. The cream of
the ugly jest is that he remains intensely loyal to some of the
principles he has been accused of betraying and, in fact, in his
fashion did betray. When he insists, as he always does nowadays,
that everything he did and was in politics had as its object the
"saving of the United States Constitution/' he is representing
himself as honestly as he can. Even in the zaniest of the Cantos,
in the mad, ranting passages about Adams and Jefferson and
poor old Van Buren, one has a sense of him as a genuine
American reformer, a zealous improver, the perpetual liberal
optimist of American letters carrying on in the spirit of 1912.
"Any agonizing," he wrote in that year, "that tends to hurry
what I believe in the end to be inevitable, our American Risorgi-
rnento, is dear to me. That awakening will make the Italian
Renaissance look like a tempest in a teapot."

If there is any one unbroken strand in Pound's experience, it is
the one that begins with this statement and continues on to what
is durable in his work today. Of all the contrarieties and polarities
in Pound, none is more striking than that of the enemy broad
caster, the partisan of Mussolini, as American patriot. The
courts may never be able to see this; it is perhaps proper that they
should not. To be betrayed by a daft patriot is not much better
than to be betrayed by a sanely calculating Iscariot. Nevertheless,
the fact cannot be denied that Pound, as a writer and as a man,
has had an immense and touching faith in the culture he ap
peared to be ready to abandon as a youth. He believed with

2/7 The Contrarieties of Ezra Pound

Whitman that American experience was fit and even glorious
material for poetry, and what he was at war with when he left
this country was the spirit that denied this and tried only for
"Attic grace" and the "classics in paraphrase/' "Make it new/'
Pound kept saying, from his colloquial rendering of Confucius,
and "Make it American," as if he were a booster of home manu
factures at a trade fair. "Are you for American poetry or for
poetry/' he wrote Miss Monroe, when she was setting up her
magazine, "The latter is more important, but it is important
that America should boost [sic!] the former, provided it don't
[sic] mean a blindness to the art. The glory of any nation is to
produce art that can be exported without disgrace to its origin.
. . . The force we have, and the impulse, but the guiding sense,
the discrimination in applying the force, we must wait and strive
for." He believed, and was to persuade many others to believe,
that the American language as well as the American experience
was fit for poetry: the speech of our people, the garment of their
consciousness, was vigorous and supple and tender enough "to be
spoken by the gods."

And this has been the point of his curious and often debated
work as a translator: he has made everything new and everything
American. Edwin Arlington Robinson, the last poet to work
effectively in the tradition Pound rejected and sought to crush,
once wrote of how Shakespeare

. . . out of his

Miraculous inviolable increase

Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like

Of olden time with timeless Englishmen.

Shakespeare sent his imagination traveling in time and space
and was never anything but English to the core. Pound ex
patriated himself for four decades in Europe and went back over
the years to Cathay millenniums before Christ and was never,
in any time or place, other than American to the marrow and
gristle. He filled Rome and Crete and the France of the trouba-
dors and China and Japan with timeless Americans. This is no
defense against treason. Yet it is a fact. In his version of

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 218

Trachiniae, or Women of Trachis., a product of his labors at St.
Elizabeths, he has Hyllos say of Herakles

They say he's in Euboea,

besieging Eurytusville
or on the way to it.

"Eurytusville j indeed! It is as if Shakespeare had written The
Merchant of Veniceshire or Timon of Athensford.

One must return, sooner or later, to the denial that always
follows hard on the affirmation. It could, of course, be no more
than a cheap trick to call Eurytus Eurytusville, whereas it was,
for an American, a foul one to broadcast, as Ezra Pound did, on
May 26, 1942, when our forces were beleaguered in almost every
quarter of the globe, that every rare and occasional decency of
the United States government, "every reform ... is an act of
homage toward Mussolini and Hitler. They are your leaders.
. . ." Unless our monitors had faulty hearing, that is what the
man said. In the nineteen presumably treasonable utterances
cited in the indictment, that is the one that, on the face of it,
is the clearest and most shameful. More often, the broadcasts
were a loony garble so much so that the Italians for a time
thought he was broadcasting secrets in code. But there it stands
"Mussolini and Hitler. They are your leaders."

It is possible to take the psychiatrists' way out and say that by
then Pound was a nut not to be held responsible. But the matter
will not rest there. Some sort of accommodation must be reached
between Pound the glorious American poet and Pound the loony
ideologue. Various possibilities suggest themselves. It has often
been argued that there is an affinity between American populism
and brutal American reaction. But this will not do for Pound
the sweet singer; except for his hatred of bankers and his funny
money, he was never fetched by the Populist fallacies. Quite the
contrary. "It is the function of the public to prevent the artist's
expression, by hook or by crook," he wrote, a few years after his
departure from England. And: "I know the man who translated
Jean Christophe, and moreover it's a popular craze, so I suppose
there must be something wrong with it." And: "I should like the
name Tmagism' to retain some sort of meaning. ... I cannot

2i$ The Contrarieties of Ezra Pound

trust any democratized committee to maintain that standard."
He was armored against undue respect for the mass of mankind.

A more promising hypothesis Is that he was beguiled even
tually into Insanity by a predilection for conspiracy theories of
life and history. The man thus beguiled sees society as a kind of
machine In which things are always going wrong. This machine
is hurting him. He himself Is not part of it. He feels he has no
control over Its workings, and therefore no responsibility for
it. He sees a human comedy and a human tragedy, and he may
be deeply moved by the spectacles, but they are spectacles things
to be seen, from somewhere offstage. Eventually, if he is clever,
he discerns ways of Improving the spectacles, removing their
flaws. The spectacles resist Improvement; the stupid players strike
back. ("I've got a right to be severe," the young Pound wrote,
"For one man I strike, there are ten to strike back at me. I
stand exposed/') Going to work on the problem, the Intellectual
hunts out a general principle a theory of society's malfunction
ing. Young men who pursued this line of thought thirty years
after Pound clutched, for obvious enough historic reasons, at the
proposition that the fault lay In the fact that the means of pro
duction and distribution were in private hands, when in fact,
for virtue's sake, they should be in public hands, as in the Soviet
Union. Some of them, delighted to have got at the root of the
problem, betrayed their heritage as foolishly and in many cases
far more effectively than Pound did. And some, too, were driven
out of their minds.

It was no doubt always in the cards that Pound would reach
for the purely mechanical device currency reform for righting
social wrongs. Loving America, as in truth plenty of the young
Communists did, he saw "society" as something else altogether
something hateful and machine-like. There were not many
social vogues in his day. Marxism was little heard of in the
circles in which he moved. Somehow he was reached by the
Social Credit people, who promised order in society. Then he
came upon Silvio Gesell, an erratic German who had observed
that interest rates bore no logical relation to economic expansion.
Usurers set rates according to what the traffic would bear. Who
were the usurers? The principal ones, obviously, were the great

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 220

International bankers. From this point, Pound made the classic
leap to anti-Semitism. Somewhat earlier, he had made the leap
to the corporate state in Italy. Pound clearly liked the grandiosity
of it and he liked the most comical of Mussolini's thrashings
about in the name of "order/' or meaningful timetables; it ap
peared a genuine effort to take the frustrations out of life, to
organize society according to a principle, as Pound was trying to
organize poetry according to a principle.

We can never know when the cord at last snapped. Nothing we
can find in Pound's poetry or his life prepares us for the exces-
siveness or the sheer franticness of his social concerns. An infatua
tion with Mussolini would be understandable; Pound was given
to infatuations. But the mind boggles when this great critical
spirit is heard claiming for Mussolini the perfection he never
found in others and so seldom found even in himself. "The
more one examines the Milan speech," he wrote apropos of a
run-of-the-mine bit of rhetoric by Mussolini, "the more one is
reminded of Brancusi, the stone blocks from which no error
emerges, from whatever angle one looks at them." A quotation
from Jefferson and/ or Mussolini, published in 1935.

By then the cord was certainly badly frayed.

In his years in St. Elizabeths, Pound has steadily maintained
that he had no wish to oppose this country during the war. He
points out, in lucid moments, that he could have saved himself
all his misery by the simple device of accepting Italian citizenship
in 1939. He clung to his American passport. It is a matter of
record that he tried in 1942 to get aboard the last diplomatic train
that took Americans from Rome to Lisbon. He was refused
permission to board it. He had no choice but to stay in Rapallo.
After a while the Italians asked him to broadcast. He accepted.
He has said that "no scripts were prepared for me by anybody,
and I spoke only when I wanted to." And he goes on, not at all
lucidly, "I was only trying to tell the people of Europe and
America how they could avoid war by learning the facts about
money." The war was itself then an unavoidable fact, and it was
not about money though it does happen to be true that most
of Pound's broadcasts did deal with his currency obsessions. It
also happens to be true that he lent himself, on whatever terms,

22 j The Contrarieties of Ezra Pound

to the enemy. He now forgets the terms: "I'd die for an Idea all
right, but to die for an Idea I've forgotten Is too much."

He lived out the war In Rapallo, writing and making his
occasional broadcasts, and In November 1945, hearing that units
of the American occupation forces were looking for him, he
delivered himself to the proper military authorities. They placed
him under arrest and kept him in an encampment or Dis
ciplinary Training Center near Pisa. Someone In the Army
goofed; the word went out that Pound was violent and also that
the fascists thought so highly of him that armed bands might
seek to free him. A special cage was built for him out of the
heavy mesh steel used for temporary runways. "They thought I
was a dangerous wild man and were scared of me. I had a guard
night and day. . . . Soldiers used to come up to the cage and
look at me. Some of them brought me food. Old Ez was a prize
exhibit/* For months he lived caged, sleeping on the ground,
shielded from the sun and rain only by some tar paper a kindly
G.I. found for him. In the cage, he wrote furiously, madly,
poignantly. The fruit of the imprisonment was The Pisan Cantos^
for which a distinguished group of American scholars, appointed
by the Librarian of Congress, voted him the Bollingen-LIbrary
of Congress Award of $1,000 for "the highest achievement of
American poetry" in the year they were published, 1948. (The
howls that went up after this put an end to the committee and
the award.) By 1948, he had transferred his residence to St.
Elizabeths, had suffered out eighteen months in a "maximum-
security ward, and was enjoying the limited freedom he now
has freedom to roam the asylum grounds as long as he stays
in sight of the building in which he lives and freedom to chat
with such as Kasper and freedom to write

The States have passed thru a

dam'd supercilious era
Down, Deny-down

Oh, let an old-man rest.

He will very likely die there. There has been a clamor of
sorts for his release over the last few years, but nothing ever

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 222

comes of it. The indictment still stands; there is no statute of
limitations on treason. The psychiatrists* opinion that he is in
competent to take part in his own defense still stands. Since he
is not dangerous and since he receives no therapy at the hospital,
he might be released still under indictment, still adjudged in
competent to state his own case in the custody of his wife and
his friends, who are numerous and long-suffering. Would this
mean encouraging intrigues with the likes of young John Kasper?
He is free for these intrigues now, and if they are to be taken
seriously if, that is, anyone is really to believe that Ezra Pound
is a force in our political life his status as martyr and prisoner
gives an extra cutting edge of hate and resentment to him and
to his frowzier associates. Actually, there is no reason to believe
that he is any sort of a force. He made some broadcasts for
the fascists years ago. They were reprehensible. But, as he asked,
"Does anyone have the faintest idea what I said?" No one does,
unless he looks it up in the indictment. In the language he might
be admiring if his contact with American life was restored, we
won the war and, anyway, no one ever listened to that crazy
jazz. The government, if it wished, could act not on grounds of
justice but on grounds of largesse. It has sat by while some pretty
low characters have been sprung in Germany, Italy, and Japan
real war criminals, now given positions of trust. The war-
criminal side of Pound is as trivial in terms of history as his
poetry is great. As Hayden Carruth wrote in Perspectives USA,
the publication distributed to the intelligentsia abroad in bundle
lots, "It is hard to think of a good reason why Pound should
not have his freedom immediately."

Sidney Hillman, or the Doctrine
of Good Connections

5 3

MATTHEW JOSEPHSON'S LIFE of the late Sidney Hillman is a long,
dull, piety-ridden book but a document nevertheless of consider
able interest. It is, for one thing, the most ambitious study of a
labor leader that any American writer has undertaken. This is in
itself an odd and striking circumstance. For years now, American
writers, the main body of them anyway, have felt and sometimes
passionately expressed an affinity for organized labor. On num
berless occasions they have made common cause with its leaders.
But while whole posses of novelists, dramatists, biographers, have
been taking out after businessmen, politicians, Army officers,
juvenile delinquents, inventors, movie stars, clergymen, doctors,
hucksters, educators, hoboes, and just about everything else that
American life turns up, no man of letters has seriously con
fronted the labor leader.

There have, of course, been books by Ph.D. candidates and
journalists (the economist George Soule did a short life of Hill
man in 1939). but Josephson is the first certifiable literary type
to pick up the challenge. And Josephson is literary, all right, all
right a veteran of the Left Bank and left wing, a former
Dadaist and editor of transition, the author of an early dis
course on alienation, Portrait of the Artist as an American,
and of biographies of Rousseau, Zola, and Stendhal.

It is fitting in a way that the man celebrated in this pioneer
ing work should be Sidney Hillman, the founder and for thirty
years the president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of
America, the only man ever called a Labor Statesman in the
New York Herald Tribune, the favorite labor leader of Frank-

223

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 224

lin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, friend of Henry Wallace and
Henry Morgenthau and even Henry Luce, labor adviser to the
National Industrial Recovery Board and co-director of the Office
of Production Management in World War II, and, of course,
the "Sidney" of "Clear everything with Sidney" in the 1944
Presidential campaign. (Franklin Roosevelt was said to have
said it, and he probably did, and surely no labor leader in history
had had anything of the sort even rumored to have been said
about him by a President of the United States.) From the outset of
his long and astonishing career, Hillman held enormous fascina
tion for the highly placed and the high-minded. He seemed spread
with a kind of honey that fetched intellectuals as if they were
so many brown bears. Indeed, it was really this that made his
career possible, though Josephson would have us believe it was
something else. He says that "something like a religion of hu
manity" had led Hillman to the labor movement and "showed
in him to the last." He claims that Hillman invented "industrial
arbitration." He calls him the "political leader par excellence of
labor" and "perhaps the most creative of modern American
labor leaders." He sees Hillman as a great and shining spirit
loved by the workers because he "was very human and close to
them always." Hillman has, Josephson says, "become a sort of
legend for the multitudes of American workers . . . whom he
served."

This is all pretty absurd. Hillman was in many ways admira
ble, but no man could have been more remote from the workers,
and he is no sort of legend among them. A few years after his
death, he is a dim figure in the imagination, and outside the
garment centers of the country one would have a hard time
finding any worker who recalled more about him than his name
or as much. This does not mean he was unimportant. It means
simply that he did not function at the workers' level. He func
tioned among reformers, editors, executives, congressmen, clergy
men, and the like. He had been an apprentice cutter at Hart,
Schaffner & Marx in Chicago for about a year before becoming,
at twenty-three, a full-time union functionary, and after that
the rank and file saw precious little of him. "He worked at pants
for a couple of months, and then he became right away a states-

225 Sidney Hillman, or the Doctrine of Good Connections

man/' a veteran garment worker was quoted as saying in a
somewhat less reverent account than Josephson's.

Hillman rose In the labor movement and In the world be
cause he won and held the admiration of estimable people with
high social Ideals. Among his early friends and patrons were
Jane Addams, Louis Brandels, Lillian Wald, Clarence Darrow,
William O. Thompson, Mrs. Raymond Robblns, and Newton D.
Baker. It was Miss Addams and her Hull House friends, particu
larly Earl Howard, of Northwestern University, who, seeing in
Hillman a young man who looked like a poet and talked like
a sociologist, commended him to Joseph Schaffner, the head man
of Hart, Schaffner, & Marx, and something of an intellectual
himself. The operators in Schaffner's pants factory had been
restive. When Hillman started telling his former employer about
the wretchedness of their lives, Schnaffner's conscience developed
severe aches and pains, and a new day dawned in men's clothing.

Hillman was catnip for every social worker, every writer, every
liberal attorney, and just about every manufacturer he met. His
leadership first in the old United Garment Workers and then
in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, of which he became, in

1914, the first president, was in a large part a triumph of the
Doctrine of Good Connections. Now and then employers would
yield to the sheer power of the union, but more often they yielded
to Hillman's verbalizing. Josephson tells how, in the winter of

1915, Hillman went to Montreal, where a bitter strike was in
progress. "In temperatures of twenty below zero the picket lines
were filled mostly by young girls who came out at six in the
morning, only to be ridden down by the Royal Mounted Police."
The outlook was bleak. All the war powers of the Canadian
government were being used against the workers. Hillman was
undaunted. "[He] despatched many telegrams to friendly busi
ness leaders in New York. . . . Through the intercession of a
certain New York philanthropist . . . one of Montreal's largest
clothiers, at length, agreed to receive him." Hillman called on
the man and the Amalgamated was in like Flynn,

It was a novel approach to the class struggle and a hugely
successful one. There was the case of the A. Nash Tailoring
Company in Cincinnati, an enormous sweatshop owned by a

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 226

Seventh-day Adventist minister who was known as "Golden Rule"
Nash. This divine was for years the leader of the open-shop forces
in the industry and their chief ideologist. He claimed that God
was running an open shop Upstairs. Hillman got some liberal
churchman to arrange a conference with the Reverend Nash.
"We prayed together," Hillman said. After the meeting, "Golden
Rule" signed up with the union and explained to his business
associates, "Let me tell you something, brethren, Sidney Hillman,
to my mind, stands only second to the carpenter of Galilee In
his leadership of the people themselves."

From one point of view, Hillman was a highly effective labor
leader. From another, he was not a labor leader at all, but a
workers' ambassador to the employers. The Hart, Schaffner, &
Marx management bargained with him for two years before
learning that they had been doing business with the business
agent for Chicago Local 39 of the United Garment Workers.
Hillman had been representing the workers without troubling
to mention that the workers were organized in a union. The
employers had thought they were simply doing the decent thing
at the urging of a nice young man and their own better natures.

And so they had been. Learning that Hillman was connected
with the union, they were "disappointed in and even much
vexed at [him]." But not for long. Hillman gave them "the quiet
assurance that he could make a proposed union agreement pay
for them. Qosephson's italics.] He spoke in the language they
understood, the American language of practical business." Hun
dreds of employers were to hear the same assurances, the same
easy-to-understand language down through the years. And they
were to discover that Hillman, as a rule, a golden one, was right.

Nothing contributed more to Hillman's reputation as a Labor
Statesman than the Amalgamated^ efforts to serve as a laboratory
of social improvement. Viewed strictly as a trade union, the
Amalgamated was, and is, just so-so. Not bad, really, but not so
hot either. It is hard to compare its wage scales with those of
other unions, even of so closely related a one as Dubinsky's
International Ladies' Garment Workers'. But It has certainly
done no better by Its members than the average union, and an
impressive case can be made out to the effect that it has not done

227 Sidney Hillman, or the Doctrine of Good Connections

nearly as well. In any event, many unions have done more.
Judged by the degree of Internal democracy, the Amalgamated
is probably a bit below par. It Is not as bad as the International
Longshoremen's Association, but it Is not anywhere near as good
as, say, the United Automobile Workers.

But as an assembly of gadgets for "enriching" the lives of its
members In other than financial ways, nothing matches it. Hill-
man went In for enrichment right at the start. A lecturer on
elevating topics named Dr. Max Goldfarb said that the new
union should be "a temple within and a fortress without/' and
the phrase so pleased Hlllman that he put Dr. Goldfarb on the
payroll to sow seeds of culture in Amalgamated locals all over
the country. After Dr. Goldfarb came a whole flood of devices
for uplift, co-operative living, and the like. There were hous
ing projects, workers* schools, labor colleges, insurance plans,
choral groups, art classes, worker-owned plants, children's pro
grams, and other such side shows. Some of these turned out well;
others, like the worker-owned plants, fizzled. The best known
today, no doubt, are the Amalgamated Banks in New York and
Chicago, which, as the late Benjamin Stolberg once wrote, "do
a small and safe commercial business and render the members of
the union no service that they cannot get elsewhere/'

In the large view, however, these ornaments paid off quite
handsomely. For it was upon them rather than upon its accom
plishments as a collective-bargaining agency that the Amalga-
mated's reputation rested. Without them, it would have been
just another union; with them, it was "the New Unionism/' It
was with these gimmicks, along with such purely verbal tricks as
a redefinition of collective bargaining as "industrial science/'
that made Hlllman seem a towering figure to the editors of the
Survey Graphic and the New Republic and to reformers like
Louis Kirstein, Felix Frankfurter, and William Z. Ripley; that
brought him invitations to address political-science academies
and other learned groups; that led to the term "Labor States
man"; that made him a court favorite in two liberal administra
tions; and that produced this devotional essay by Matthew
Josephson.

One wonders why all these trained minds succumbed so read-

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 228

ily to Sidney Hillman. Is there some quirk in the pragmatic
mind that is always getting form and substance mixed up? The
experience of American intellectuals with Communism suggests
such a possibility. Or is it, perhaps, that American liberalism has
such a profoundly middle-class base that liberals are offended
by militancy in collective bargaining and feel most comfortable
with leaders who, like Hillman, appear to subordinate this gross
activity to the task of housebreaking the workers?

In any event, the gimmicks, quite apart from what they may
have done for Hillman's ego, a sizable and intricate one, were
of value to the union qua union. The Amalgamated began as
a dual organization, and it won its most notable advantage over
the United Garment Workers when Hillman's friends in the
Wilson administration fixed things so that it should be the
favored agency in firms getting military-uniform contracts. Be
tween the New Freedom and the New Deal, the Amalgamated
had a fairly rocky time of it, particularly toward the end, but
then Felix Frankfurter became a power in Washington, Miss
Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor, and Hillman was
called on to help draft N.R.A. codes and advise on labor legis
lation. Under the New Deal the union in time consolidated its
power. There is no more United Garment Workers. The Amalga
mated is now secure, thanks largely to the gadgets which wowed
the gadget-minded who were in a position to make it secure.

Hillman had a healthy interest in power and throughout most
of his long career dreamed of being head man not only of the
men's clothing workers but of the women's as well. He regarded
it as irrational that the needle trades should be divided accord
ing to the sex for which the cutters and stitchers cut and stitched.
He believed that the Amalgamated and the International Ladies*
Garment Workers' should consolidate under his leadership.
Josephson mentions this ambition and says that the barrier to it
was the presence in the ILGWU of one man "to whom the idea
of amalgamation was anathema." He goes on to say: "David
Dubinsky, on the other hand, was one of the ILGWU executives
who then [circa 1926] favored a combination of forces under the
seemingly invincible Hillman/' He does not explain why, when

22$ Sidney Hillman, or the Doctrine of Good Connections

Dubinsky replaced Benjamin Schlesinger as head of the ILGWU,
the combination of forces did not take place. As a matter of fact,
It almost did, and thereby hangs a tale, which Dubinsky loves to
relate. Hillman was still strong for a wedding of the unions in
1933, when he became a labor adviser to the N.R.A. "I told him/*
Dubinsky has said, "that If he would help us get a good NRA
code, I'd step aside and let him be president." Before he gave a
thought to the men's-clothing code, Hillman worked like a dog
getting a model code for ladles' garments. He wheedled, he
coaxed, he waxed eloquent, he used all his Good Connections.
He succeeded remarkably well. "Then he went to work on men's/'
Dubinsky says. "His credit with his friends It was all used up.
They said, 'Please, Sidney, I did everything I could for you last
week more don't ask of me/ " Thanks to the way Hillman had
drawn on his credit, the ILGWU got a much better code than
the Amalgamated, and Hillman, now In a poorer power position
vis-a-vis Dubinsky, was in no hurry for a merger.

Josephson makes no attempt to judge Hillman's career as a
whole. It would be difficult for anyone to do. Hillman did a lot
to improve conditions in one of our worst industries. The United
Garment Workers would never have done anything; it was a
racket for selling union labels to sew on workingmen's overalls.
Some of the Amalgamated's contracts were bogus, too. Hillman
often signed an agreement that won union recognition but noth
ing extra In the pay envelope. But sooner or later the money
came, and, taken on the whole, things got a good deal better over
the years.

Hillman was also important because he was the first American
labor leader to form a close alliance with bourgeois reformers
and liberal politicians. He was not a ranter like John L. Lewis
or a reactionary like William Green. As labor grew in power, it
needed a "statesman/' and Hillman looked the part. He was
effective in the Office of Production Management, but so was
William Knudsen, and no one thought of calling him a states
man; even the liberals assumed that industry could give the
country some good public servants. Hillman led the Political
Action Committee of the C.I.O. in 1944, and this was one of
labor's first really organized political ventures. It was not really

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 230

much o a success. Hillman allowed it to be overrun with Com
munists and fellow travelers; the last time the P.A.G. was heard
about was when a large batch of its former functionaries joined
Henry Wallace's Progressives in 1948. Hillman was not, of
course, pro-Communist. Indeed, he had allowed racketeers into
the Amalgamated in the twenties to pitch the Communists out,
and he later had quite a time pitching the goons out. But he was
an opportunist and a man knowing enough about left-wing affairs
to realize that when the Communists were with you, they could
take care of a lot of the dirty work. Hillman allowed them to
wreck the American Labor party in New York as well as the
P.A.C. Hillman was, in short, a labor politician. He was no states
man.

The Wicked Conspiracy Against

General MacArthur

1956

NO LIVING AMERICAN, no eminent American of recent times, has
been so hopelessly addicted to the conspiracy theory o history as
General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. Alongside this warrior-
statesman, Vice-President Nixon and Senator McCarthy have
been mere triflers. Each has done his share to make the doctrine
fashionable and serviceable, but there is no reason to suppose
that either takes it with any real seriousness. Neither seems an
authentically dedicated spirit. Senator James Eastland, of Mis
sissippi, belongs, in my view, with them rather than with
MacArthur. He has, it is true, carried the theory to new heights
with his assertions that the Supreme Court has been "brain
washed" by radicals and that "left-wing pressure groups are in
control of the government of the United States." But the very
scope and grandeur of his charges seem to reveal an essential
frivolity about the conspiracy theory. I hope it will not be re
garded as frivolity on my part if I add that Senator Eastland is
rather fat and has the look of a man very satisfied with his lot
in life, which is in many ways an enviable one. In my researches,
I have yet to encounter a really serious adherent of the con
spiracy theory who is portly. My judgments may be subject to
revision, though, when and if Senator Eastland conducts an
investigation of General MacArthur's claim that his recall by
President Truman in 1951 was part of a global plot in which the
British traitors Guy Burgess and Douglas Maclean were the
central figures, but as of now Eastland appears to stand with
those who use the conspiracy theory as a good thing not as the
key to history.

232

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 232

Of MacArthur's earnestness, though, there can be little doubt.
He is a True Believer and not a rank-and-file one, but a com
mander, egocentric, messianic, entete, a True Believer in himself.
Like others of the breed, he finds it necessary to ascribe his dis
appointments, which have been numerous, to base intrigue. In
his melancholy and wayward universe, there is no purely per
sonal guilt; evil always has its cabalistic aspect. There is no
such thing as pure malice or spite; there is malice in abundance,
but it can never be pure it is eternally in the service of, or
somehow compounded by, dark and terribly complex con
trivances. Thus, when he describes his recall as a "vengeful re
prisal," as he did in his recent rejoinder, in Life magazine for
February 13, to Harry Truman's reminiscences of the Korean
war, he cannot let the matter drop there, for with this characteri
zation of the act he is only on the outer surface of the truth as
he knows it. He had been aware from the start, he has advised
us, that "the disease of power was coursing through [Truman's]
veins," but this, for MacArthur was not enough to know. A
"vengeful reprisal" by a power-mad President is not in and of
itself a conspiracy. If it had been only the President whom the
General had to deal with, there would have been no contest.
Besides, there cannot be, in the nature of things, a one-man
conspiracy. "Quite apart from what Mr. Truman has to say
in his memoirs," General MacArthur writes, "I had searched in
vain for some logical explanation of my abrupt relief from com
mand in the Far East." A "logical explanation" must be one in
which malevolent design is apparent. "It was not," he tells us,
"until the recent exposure of the British spies, Burgess and
Maclean, that the true facts began to unfold."

Senator Eastland has promised to unfold the facts, presumably
before the Senate Internal Security Committee. One hopes he
will get down to work right away.* Meanwhile, there is some
fascinating material about earlier conspiracies against General
MacArthur in MacArthur: His Rendezvous with History, by
Major-General Courtney Whitney. Whitney is a former Manila
lawyer with whom MacArthur formed an enduring friendship

* He never did.

2J5 The Wicked Conspiracy Against General MacArthur

almost twenty years ago; he has been at MacArthur's side in one
capacity or another from the Lingayen Gulf to the Waldorf
Towers, from Corregldor to Remington Rand, and in spite of
what must have been resourceful competition from Major-
General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence chief for
many years, he has never had to relinquish his position as first
among the sycophants. Of him, MacArthur says:

I know of no one better qualified than he intelligently to discuss
. . . my role in the stirring events which have encompassed the Far
East since the start of World War II. ... [His] actual participation in
the events and his knowledge of the concepts underlying my actions
cannot fail to ensure the historical accuracy and corresponding value of
Ms work.

He might have added that Whitney is blessed with a humility
that is rare among memoirists. Although it is, after all, his book,
he says little of anything about his participation in the stirring
events. He retires from the scene entirely whenever it is possible
to let MacArthur tell his own story, which is much of the time.
The book consists very largely of documents reports, memo
randa, letters, wise sayings, public speeches by the rendezvouser
with history himself, and may be considered, as Hanson Baldwin
has pointed out, as General MacArthur's valedictory and apolo
gia. It is informed and illuminated from start to finish by the
view that not only the Far East but the world in general since
the mid-thirties has been the stage for a titanic conflict between
Douglas MacArthur and Satan in manifold disguises, most of
them thin. Some of the early developments may be briefly sum
marized as follows:

1932: MacArthur defeats Communists on Anacostia Flats. Com
munists shrewdly figure that MacArthur is their principal ad
versary. Hatch plot to have "public trial and hanging in front
of the Capitol of high government officials. At the very top of the
list was the name of Army Chief of Staff MacArthur." Plot does
not work out, but Communists form close anti-MacArthur alli
ance with " 'Europe-first' cliques in the War and State Depart
ments."

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 234

1935-36: MacArthur now in Philippines, getting ready for
World War II. Washington conspirators turn out to have long
reach. "Even in those early days when he had first started build
ing the Philippines' defenses, U. S. officials had harassed him right
in Manila. Frank Murphy, as High Commissioner of the Philip
pines, betrayed his jealousy of MacArthur's stature in the islands
by initiating a personal campaign of pressure on President
Roosevelt to cause the General's removal/' Time not quite ripe.
Campaign fails. MacArthur retires voluntarily and receives
"accolade" from F.D.R., who says, "Your service in war and
peace is a brilliant chapter in American history." True enough.
"But accolades did not prevent MacArthur from being sniped
at." Mephisto never sleeps. Plot goes on.

1936-41: MacArthur working for Philippine government, head
of armed forces, Field Marshal in Army. Nevertheless, finds him
self "facing a movement to supplant him even in this position.
. . . The movement gained powerful support in Washington but
failed. . . ." It failed, but it did not cease. Complications in
Manila. "[The] Philippine Assembly delayed on appropriations;
some politicians tried to cut down the amounts MacArthur
needed/' Reflecting on all this, MacArthur one day said to
Whitney, "Destiny, by the grace of God, sometimes plays queer
pranks with men's lives/'

United States at war in Europe and Far East. Anti-
MacArthur campaign stepped up. Navy becomes involved. Also
England, France, and, of course, Soviet Union. But especially
Washington. "While MacArthur, alone of all commanders in the
Pacific, was stopping the enemy in his tracks, he was being
sacrificed in Washington/' Roosevelt (he of the deceptive acco
lade), Marshall, Churchill, Admiral Ernest J. King the whole
crew "handed MacArthur the stewardship of a military disaster.
And what made it one of the cruelest deceptions of the war was
that they not only did not tell MacArthur but instead tried with
every circumlocution possible to pretend the opposite of the
truth." MacArthur turns out to be the only man who wants to

2J5 The Wicked Conspiracy Against General MacArthur

win the war. "MacArthnr's plan for a breakthrough and con
tinued resistance [In the Philippines] was vetoed by Marshall.
. . . Evidently the indomitable will no longer existed In Wash
ington. . . . Defeatism [seemed] to be infecting the Pentagon."
MacArthur forced to leave Philippines. VIce-Admiral Herbert
Fairfax Leary refuses to lend good planes to evacuate MacArthur
party. Offers three crates, one of which cracks up, killing two of
crew. MacArthur finally gets decent plane, goes to Australia, wins
war against heavy odds. King, Mountbatten, and other dupes
"trying to relegate MacArthur to ... a minor holding action/'
but cannot manage it. MacArthur In end receives Japanese sur
render in splendid ceremony. Goes to Tokyo, rehabilitates Japan,
and awaits Armageddon.

In the end, the entire United States is made to seem an instru
ment for bringing misery into the life of Douglas MacArthur.
At first It is only the politicians who frustrate his grand designs,
but after a time the plot thickens, and in the end we are all of us,
dear Brutus, held in some measure responsible for "the humilia
tion that seared his soul." There is some justice in this dreadful
world, though; for this "foul and shocking blow/' we are being
suitably repaid In kind:

Ever since the removal of MacArthur from a position of influence in
Asia, Communism has progressively strengthened and become an in
creasingly powerful threat to peace and freedom.

There is authentic tragedy here as well as comedy, for the truth
is that there are elements of greatness in Douglas MacArthur.
He has served this country as a valorous and resourceful captain
in the field and as a gifted proconsul. He has at times borne
himself with splendor and shown himself capable of command
ing abiding loyalties. I know an officer who served under him in
the Pacific and is now one of the most Intelligent and imagina
tive of American diplomatic strategists. He shares none of Mac-
Arthur's views on matters of policy and at the same time hugely
admires MacArthur the military campaigner. One gets a sense
of greatness even from Whitney's preposterous book. A basically
cloddish mind is moved to Imagination ("This, I thought, must

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 236

have been what it was like in a tent in Gaul with Caesar; on the
approaches to Cannae with Hannibal; on the plains before
Guagamela with Alexander the Great . . .") and to massive
recrimination by the spectacle of his commander's triumphs and
misfortunes. Great soldiers are not the less great for having
jejune views of history. Napoleon had a Napoleonic complex.

Indeed, a distinction that one cannot take lightly is the very
concern with policy that has led MacArthur into so many diffi
culties. Whether the man is sensible or not in his political
avouchments, he has never been a time-server, he has never been
indifferent to the aims of the governments he has served. He has
always, at least, cared. Liberals who have applauded the inde
pendence and the concern with policy of officers like Billy
Mitchell and Charles de Gaulle have been a good deal too facile
in condemning MacArthur for insubordination which consisted
in the main of taking his case to the public. What was wrong was
not so much his public contentiousness as the case itself, the
strategy he favored. Robert Clive was similarly mistaken, and so
was Gordon of Khartoum, a man very much like MacArthur.
There is in MacArthur, as there was in them, something of the
"heaven-born general," to use Pitt's phrase for Clive, another
prodigy, mystic, orator, and empire builder.

Yet MacArthur, principally through his commitment to the
conspiracy theory, insists on making himself ridiculous. Now,
on top of the Whitney book, with its abundance of plots, he
has come up with the superplot, involving Burgess and Maclean,
and such is his prestige and the hunger of our Bolsheviks of
the Right for conspiracies that the story has become a matter for
serious public debate. To David Lawrence and to his U.S. News
6- World Report, part of the matter is already beyond dispute.
"It was these two men," U.S. News has said, "who helped to
trigger the invasion by armies of Communist China at the mo
ment of defeat for Soviet-armed North Koreans." This is Mac-
Arthur's basic contention in these later days that the Chinese
entered the war because they had been assured by Burgess and
Maclean that we would engage them nowhere in Korea. His
second proposition is that it was a reluctance on the part of the
Truman administration to reveal the simple but ugly truth that

257 The Wicked Conspiracy Against General Mac Arthur

led to his removal by President Truman on April n, 1951. The
editors of Life have regarded this as a plausible version of
history, and the editors of the National Review find so much
political promise in it that they wish to have it Investigated not
by a mere committee, such as Senator Eastiand's, but by a "mixed
commission . . . with members from Congress, the administra
tion, and the public."

It is characteristic of the mind in the grip of the conspiracy
theory that It marshals argument untidily. Those who credit the
new MacArthur story must do so either by faith In MacArthur
himself or through a shared addiction to the theory. MacArthur
Is the only man who has ever made a stab at finding logic In it
or imposing logic upon It, and his facility with the syllogism Is
far from all It might be. To stay with him even part of the way,
one must concede that the Peiping government in 1950 was by
one means or another being made privy to the discussions of
American policy in the National Security Council and elsewhere,
as well as to the decisions emerging from those deliberations.
MacArthur himself has no difficulty In making this assumption,
for to him It Is only reasonable to take It for granted that the
Chinese Communists would never have been stupid enough to
engage him In battle if they had not had "definite advance In
formation that my hands would be tied."

Only [he writes] if he were certain that we would continue to protect
his bases and supply lines would a commander have dared to throw the
full weight of the Chinese army in Korea.

The Chinese could not have been serious (even in delusion)
in calling us a "paper tiger," so long as they knew that Mac-
Arthur was in command and had a free hand. But the tying of
his hands made us in fact vulnerable.

To some of us, It may appear that a Communist leader who
took at face value "definite advance Information" on American
strategy, which has been so consistently subject to abrupt change,
would be well along the road to madness. If anyone even con
templates making war against the United States, he should
acknowledge that the beginning of wisdom is an acceptance of
our unpredictability. There Is no such thing as "definite ad
vance information" in matters of this sort-

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 238

But MacArthur thinks otherwise, and so, taking for granted
that the Chinese had received the necessary advance assurances,
he thinks it necessary only to uncover the "links in the chain to
our enemy in Korea through Peiping by way of Moscow." Why
not, one wonders, direct to Peiping or perhaps, as some people
believed a few weeks back, by way of London or New Delhi?
This is not explained, but a firm conviction is stated:

I myself have long been convinced that Red China's decision to com
mit its forces to the Korean peninsula was predicated upon assurances
previously given through Moscow that such intervention would not
precipitate retaliation against its attack bases.

Now to get Burgess and Maclean into the act: MacArthur
makes a breath-taking leap from the enemy's knowledge of what
was happening in Washington to his knowledge of what was
going to happen in Korea, In theory, of course, what was hap
pening in Washington should have been a reliable guide to what
the American forces were going to do in Korea. But in fact a
number of Americans and practically all Europeans had the
feeling that perhaps one decision would be taken by President
Truman and his advisers and another by General MacArthur.
MacArthur, though, thinks everyone should have known better
in the Whitney book, the notion that MacArthur was ever
at any time insubordinate to civil authority is treated as too
absurd to discuss and that the Chinese certainly did know
better. (It is curious that MacArthur and Whitney consistently
attribute sounder judgment to the Communists than to their ad
versaries, himself, of course, excepted.) Someone, it follows, had
tipped the Communists off. It now appears, according to Mac-
Arthur, to have been Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. How
does he know? MacArthur, in Life, has constructed what passes
for a syllogism in the conspiracy school. "General [Walton]
Walker," he says, "complained constantly to me that the enemy
was receiving prior information of his movements." Plainly, if
they had prior information, it, had to come from behind United
Nations lines in Korea. Ordinary people might assume that,
since there were plenty of spies in South Korea, what informa
tion the Communists had was provided them by their own

sjS? The Wicked Conspiracy Against General MacArthur

agents behind the U.N. lines. MacArthur says this was not so.
"We could find no leaks in Korea or Japan/' I MacArthur's
intelligence and counter-intelligence directed by the redoubtable
General Willoughby could not find any leaks, then there could
not have been any.

In time there was light. "Then suddenly, one of my dispatches
concerning the order of battle was published in a Washington
paper within a few hours of its receipt." He does not identify
either the dispatch or the newspaper that printed it. He merely
says: "I insisted that those responsible be prosecuted." Pre
sumably he identified the guilty for the benefit of those he ex
pected to undertake the prosecution. Fortunately, for unauthor
ized persons and latecomers, the Whitney book throws some light.
It identifies the offending newspaper as the Washington Post and
explains that "on December 30, 1950 . . . one of MacArthur's
top-secret dispatches on the order of battle was in part published
verbatim . . . under the byline of a prominent columnist." A
check of the Washington Post of that date reveals that the
columnist was Drew Pearson, whose work appears in some six
hundred newspapers here and abroad, and that Pearson that day
published what purported to be a report from MacArthur's in
telligence section dated December 6, 1950. MacArthur's "few
hours" turn out to be 576 (give or take ten or twenty for time
changes and publication schedules), and it was not precisely one
of his "dispatches concerning the order of battle," but, on the
contrary, a dispatch from General Willoughby on the Chinese
order of battle.

Still, there was a leak, rather a slow one, but nevertheless de
plorable. Drew Pearson should not have had access to Wil-
loughby's cables. Someone was responsible. Who? Burgess and
Maclean, MacArthur now tells us. How come? MacArthur does
not withhold the answer, though he gives it in question form:

If they did not report to their Kremlin masters fully upon our secrets
in the conduct of the war against the Communists in Korea, what then
could have been their treasonable purpose?

What indeed? Any good Communist spy would report anything
he knew about the Korean war. If he got hold of news about

A FEW ENTHUSIASMS AND HOSTILITIES 240

United Nations troop movements, naturally he would pass it
on, in glee and triumph. And he would also report what our side
knew about his side. But would he report to Drew Pearson? Was
Pearson one of Burgess and Maclean's "Kremlin masters"? This
is not gone into nor does MacArthur cast any light on what was
going on in the White House, the Pentagon, or the National
Security Council. Somebody must have leaked to Burgess and
Maclean before Burgess and Maclean could leak to Pearson.

MacArthur, incidentally, writes as if Burgess and Maclean
were both in Washington at the time of the Chinese intervention.
Maclean was in the Foreign Office in London; he had become
head of the American desk on November 6, 1950, and no doubt
he was receiving some British intelligence and some highly edu
cated guesses about American policy and plans. Burgess was in
fact in Washington. But it is doubtful if he was getting tran
scripts of N.S.C. proceedings within a matter of hours. And it
was manifestly impossible for him to have been told the outcome
of discussions that had no outcome. The truth is that on Decem
ber 6, 1950, we had no settled policy on what we would do
on the Yalu. The issue was under discussion not only in Wash
ington but at the United Nations in New York. There may have
been a tentative American position a decision on what this
country would do if agreement with other powers could be
reached and if the military conditions were right. But there is
always a great gulf between decisions of this sort and the policy
that is in time pursued. After all, we once had a policy in which
Korea was held to be outside our defense perimeter. Dean
Acheson has taken the rap for making it public, but MacArthur
accepted it and was not averse to discussing it with newspaper
men.* In any case, when the Thirty-eighth Parallel was breached,

* As early as March 1949, he had told the British newspaperman G. Ward
Price that "Our line of defense runs through the chain of islands fringing
the coast of Asia. It starts from the Philippines and continues through the
Ryukyu archipelago, which includes its main bastion, Okinawa. Then it
bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain to Alaska. Though
the advance of the Red Armies in China places them on the flank of that
position, this does not alter the fact that our only possible adversary on the
Asiatic continent does not possess an industrial base near enough to supply
an amphibious attacking force." By our "main adversary," he could only at
that time have meant the Soviet Union.

241 The Wicked Conspiracy Against General MacArthur

we reversed the policy. That is how things go in the real world.
Men say they will do one thing and then do another. If the
Chinese Communists, having seen us throw one policy decision
to the winds, placed complete confidence in another, their sense
of reality could not have been as formidable as some of us as
sumed it to be. They might have found the reports from Burgess
and Maclean interesting, provided there were any such reports,
but they would have been mighty foolish Communists to have
put any stock in them. But then they are no more exempt
from foolishness than we are.

The Pearson incident is the central one in MacArthur's render
ing of the history of 1950 and 1951. It proves, retroactively, that
Burgess and Maclean told the Chinese they would have a romp
if they entered the war. Burgess and Maclean told Drew Pearson,
ergo they told Mao Tse-tung. (It is hard to explain why he does
not avail himself of almost infallible logic: They were Com
munists, ergo they told Mao Tse-tung.) MacArthur explains
that when he could find "no leak" in his own theater, he promptly
recommended that "a treason trial be initiated to break up [the]
spy ring responsible for the purloining of my secret reports to
Washington." (This is a beautiful example of how the mind
obsessed by conspiracy works. He concedes that he did not know
who "purloined*' the reports until years later. He wanted a trial
before there were suspects a trial of a "ring." As it turned out,
the putative defendants had diplomatic immunity.) And he goes
on: "I believe that my demand that this situation [there is no
antecedent for the "this"] be exposed, coming after the Alger
Hiss and Harry Dexter White scandals caused the deepest resent
ment. [The] case was never processed, and I was shortly relieved
of my command."

And after him, the deluge.

PART FOUR

JUDGMENTS RESERVED

Privacy and the Claims of Community

1958

IT is REPEATEDLY asserted by solicitous groups and individuals
that the right of privacy described once by Mr. Justice Brandeis
as the "right to be let alone . . the most comprehensive of
rights and the right most valued by civilized men" is in sorry
shape in this Republic today. The evidence is impressive. Wire
tapping is epidemic; even where it is illegal, it flourishes, and
some authorities believe that the number of telephones being
monitored on any given day runs into the hundreds of thousands.
"Bugging," the use of concealed electronic devices by absentee
eavesdroppers, is an almost universal practice among policemen,
private detectives, and both public and private investigators.
People describing themselves as "investigators" are as numerous
and as pestiferous, it often seems, as flies in late September. Each
day, more and more of us are required to tell agencies of govern
ment more and more about ourselves; and each melancholy day,
government agencies are telling more and more about us. Some
one in the F.B.I. not J. Edgar Hoover, certainly, but someone
slips a "raw'* file to a favored congressman; the President
instincts the Bureau of Internal Revenue to turn over income-tax
returns to an investigating committee; the Defense Department
gives medical records to an insurance adjuster. The existence of
the files, apart from their disclosure, may itself be regarded as a
violation of privacy; we are compelled to leave bits and pieces
of ourselves in many places where we would just as soon not be.
Broadly speaking, invasions of privacy are of two sorts, both on
the increase. There are those, like wire tapping and bugging and
disclosure of supposedly confidential documents, that could con-

245

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 246

ceivably be dealt with by changes in law or public policy. Then
there axe those that appear to be exercises of other rights for
example, freedom of speech, of the press, of inquiry. A news
paper reporter asks an impertinent personal question; the
prospective employer of a friend wishes to know whether the
friend has a happy sex life; a motivational researcher wishes to
know what we have against Brand B deodorant; a magazine
wishing to lure more advertisers asks us to fill out a questionnaire
on our social, financial, and intellectual status. Brandeis' "right
to be let alone" is unique in that it can be denied us by the
powerless as well as by the powerful by a teen-ager with a
portable radio as well as by a servant of the law armed with
a subpoena.

Most of those who publicly lament the decline of privacy
talk as if they believe that the causes are essentially political;
they seem to feel that enemies of individual rights are conspiring
to destroy privacy just as certain of them have sought, in recent
years, to destroy the right to avoid self-incrimination. Some also
see privacy eroding as a consequence of a diminishing respect
for it. I think there may be something in both points, although
a good deal less in the first than in the second; but it seems
to me that the really important causes lie elsewhere in our
advancing technology and in the growing size and complexity of
our society. Until the early part of this century, the right of
privacy was seldom invoked. Though its broadest and most
binding guarantee is in the Fourth Amendment to the Consti
tution, which affirms "the right of the people to be secure in
their persons, houses, papers and effects" and prohibits unreason
able searches and seizures, it was not until 1905 that a court
squarely upheld the right of privacy. The jurisdiction was Geor
gia, and the court laid it down as a common-law proposition that
"the right of privacy has its foundations in the instincts of
nature." In a thinly populated land, with government touching
only lightly on the everyday lives of citizens and with a technol
ogy so primitive that people had to depend on their own eyes
and ears to know what others were up to, men armed with the
Fourth Amendment and with the squirrel gun pennitted them
under the Second Amendment could pretty well attend to their

247 Privacy and the Claims of Community

own privacy. Mostly, one supposes, it was not thought of as a
"right" to be protected but as a condition of life cherished by
some and merely accepted by others.

But then came the camera, the telephone, the graduated income
tax, and later the tape recorder, the behavioral scientist, tele
vision (now being used to follow us as we move about super
markets and department stores as a kind of radar for the light-
fingered), the professional social worker, "togetherness/* and a
host of other developments that are destructive of privacy as a
right and as a condition. Soundproofing is the only technological
contribution I can think of that has been an aid to the right to
be let alone. The rest have lent themselves to invasions of privacy,
and the end is not yet in sight. Wire tapping, for example, is
now in the process of being fully automated; where formerly
the number of phones that could be tapped was limited by
the number of personnel that could be assigned to sitting around
all day waiting for a conversation to intercept, today innumerable
phones can be monitored entirely by machines. Someday, no
doubt, we shall be spied upon from space platforms equipped
with television cameras. And all this time the welfare state has
been developing in the main, of course, as a response to
technology. It may be that a disrespect for privacy has been on
the increase, too, but what is certain is that those of a trespassing
inclination are infinitely better equipped today and have infi
nitely more excuses for their incursions. I rather think this is the
essential thing, for I believe that if the Georgia court was
correct in saying that the "instincts of nature" provided founda
tions for the right of privacy, the same thing may also be
cited as a source of motive power for those who assume the
right to violate privacy. Was it not the late Senator McCarthy
who screamed bloody murder when the Post Office Department
ran a "mail cover" on his correspondence? (In a mail cover,
postal officials do not open mail but examine envelopes and
wrappings with a view to learning the identity of a victim's
correspondents.) No doubt his outrage was as genuine as it was
noisy. There is a hermit spirit in each of us, and also a snooper,
a census taker, a gossipmonger, and a brother's keeper.

Technology has forced the surrender of a measure of privacy

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 248

in many different ways. It may be a man's business whether he
drinks or not, but if he wishes to drive a car or fly an airplane or
perform brain operations, society's need to inquire into his
drinking habits must surely override his right to privacy in this
serious matter. Government is society's instrument in such
affairs, and the more responsibilities we saddle it with, the more
we require it to take a hand in our lives. If we wish it to protect
us against quacks, frauds, swindlers, maniacs, and criminals, we
must give it powers of prosecution, punishment, and licensing.
We can be reasonably certain that its tendency will be to go too
far (the American Civil Liberties Union reports with distress
that in some places tile layers must now be licensed by public
authority), but we may indeed, it seems to me that most of us
do judge its excesses to be less dangerous than complete
laissez faire or laissez passer. Technology has made us all a great
deal more dependent upon one another than we ever were in
the past and necessarily, therefore, less able to protect our own
privacy. Once we could labor alone now there is a division of
labor which relates my work to yours. Once we traveled alone
now our mobility is collectivized, and while we have a legiti
mate concern over the habits of the man at the controls, whose
private life we find it necessary to investigate, we also constitute
ourselves a captive audience and a group of hostages to those in
whom the instincts of nature that lead to compulsive trespassing
are more powerful than those that make sometime recluses of
us all.

In my view, it gains us nothing to denounce J. Edgar Hoover
or those who descend to what Mr. Justice Holmes called the
"dirty business" of wire tapping or even to expend rhetoric on
the death of solitude in our kind of civilization, as William
Faulkner now and then does when he feels himself affronted by
the attentions of the press and the public. If there is any way at
all out of the fish bowl, it will be found only by facing some hard
facts of life today. For one thing, there is no stopping the tech
nology that extends our senses by wires and waves and electrical
impulses. For another, it is difficult if, indeed, it is possible to
distinguish, morally and practically, between the use of these
devices and the use of the senses unaided. I think that wire

249 Privacy and the Claims of Community

tapping is a dirty business, but I am not sure that I can find
much logic to support my belief so long as I am willing to
countenance the older, unmechanized ways by which society
apprehends criminals. What is the moral difference between
tapping a telephone wire and straining one's ears to overhear a
conversation believed by the participants to be private? What is
the moral difference between putting an ear to a keyhole and
bugging a room? Or between using any and all bugging devices
and planting spies and informers in the underworld? Or between
carrying a concealed tape recorder to an interview and carrying
a concealed plan to commit to memory as much of the talk as the
memory can retain? Society needs detectives, or so at least I
believe, and the means they employ have never been lovely and
have almost always involved the violation of privacy. Society
does a lot of dirty business.

So far as morality is concerned, I doubt If a valid distinction
can be made between primitive and advanced techniques. But a
practical distinction can be made, and in fact has been made
(wire tapping is either outlawed or restricted by law In every
American jurisdiction), and the rationale Is not very different
from that which proscribes mechanical devices in most sports.
Whether or not wire tapping is dirty business in the Holmesian
sense, it is dirty pool, and this applies, or soon will, one suspects,
to most other gadgets. It may be no more immoral than other
means used for the same end any more than killing with
thermonuclear weapons is more immoral than killing with a
club but somehow the advantage it gives to the police side
is offensive to sportsmanship, and the numbers that can be bagged
by automated spying, like the numbers that can be killed by a
hydrogen bomb, make it seem more offensive to our humanity.
Against this, It can be argued that crime and subversion have
also benefited by science and that their adversaries should not
have to fight a horse cavalry war against them. But the fact of
the matter is that it Is not narcotics peddlers whose privacy has
been more efficiently violated by the use of the new techniques;
the net has not been drawn tighter against society's enemies it
has simply been spread for a larger catch. And here another
practical distinction can be made, even though a moral one comes

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 250

hard. It Is one thing to deceive and trap a dope pusher by almost
any means available, and quite another to tap the phone of,
let us say, a philanthropic foundation on the chance of turning
up a relationship between It and some citizen of a heretical turn
of mind. To be sure, the underworld members of the Apalachin
rally have every bit as much right to privacy as the president of,
say, the Fund for the Republic. But the law in its wisdom has
found a way to draw a line between the two without denying
their equality; this is the doctrine of "probable cause/' embodied
as the condition for seizure and arrest In the same Fourth
Amendment that keeps most of us out of the broad net of
policemen merely fishing for evidence in our homes and among
our papers and effects.

It seems to me that it is by no means too late for law and
public policy to deal with violations of privacy that are under
taken by zealous guardians of the peace and the public order.
In all probability, wire tapping and the many forms of bugging
can never be wholly eliminated, even where they are outlawed
and the penalties for their use are severe; they suit the police
mentality too well, and they may be easily employed without
fear of detection. Moreover, there are circumstances in which
even the most ardent civil libertarians would be forced to
approve their use. But the third degree and the rubber truncheon
also suit the police mentality, and free societies have managed to
reduce their use to a point where they are not regarded as essen
tial characteristics of the machinery of law enforcement. Probable
cause, with high standards for the determination of probability,
would seem a basic safeguard against present excesses. Another
would be an extension of the rule of the inadmissibility of wire
tap evidence; this, of course, is the rule in the federal courts
today, and it has not stopped the F.B.I, and God knows how
many other government agencies from tapping wires in the
hope of learning where admissible evidence may be turned up.
But there is no reason why the rule of inadmissibility might not
be strengthened in such a way as to give ordinary criminal
defendants a chance at acquittals and reversals whenever the
prosecution's case has been made by playing dirty pool. The
police, like merchants, do not care for profitless ventures, and

2$i Privacy and the Claims of Community

somewhere, no doubt, there is a point at which most of the
profit can be taken out of the indiscriminate wire tapping and
bugging that is being employed today. Mr. Justice Murphy used
to say that there was no means of preserving the liberties of
citizens so efficacious as making the denial of those liberties
disadvantageous to the police power.

Nothing will be done, however, along this line unless a
certain amount of public pressure builds up against a catch-as-
catch-can view of law enforcement and in defense of the right
of privacy. And even if abuses of the police power were checked,
we would be left with all those invasions that are the work not
of the police power, but of other public authorities and of a
multitude of private ones. Here, as I see it, we encounter
problems far knottier than those posed by technology in the
service of law and order. We were willed a social order
dedicated to the sovereignty of the individual but, again thanks
mainly to technology, dependent for its functioning largely on
the interdependence of lives. My behavior affects my neighbor
in a hundred ways undreamed of a century ago. My home is
joined to his by pipes and cables, by tax and insurance rates. If
my labor is not immediately dependent on his, it is on that of
other men down the street and across the continent. When I
move about, my life is at my neighbor's mercy and his, of
course, at mine. I may build a high fence, bolt the doors, draw
the blinds, and insist that my time to myself is mine alone, but
his devices for intrusion are limitless. My privacy can be invaded
by a ringing telephone as well as by a tapped one. It can be
invaded by an insistent community that seeks to shame me into
getting up off my haunches to do something for the P.-T.A. or
town improvement or the American Civil Liberties Union
possibly, for this worthy organization, making a survey of
invasions of privacy. My "right to be let alone" is a right I may
cherish and from time to time invoke, but it is not a right favored
by the conditions of the life I lead and am, by and large, pleased
to be leading. If I were to think of it as any sort of absolute
right, I would be as blind to the world about me as those who
used to believe that the United States could assert and by itself
defend its right to be let alone. No kind of sovereignty has ever

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 232

been absolute, but in the last century or so the decline has been
staggering.

The meaningful invasions that are a consequence of the con
dition of our lives are, to be sure, those undertaken more or
less in the name of the whole community: by organs of govern
ment other than the police, by the press, by education, by
business. Against them, the law can offer few defenses without
denying other freedoms and committing new invasions of privacy.
The press has a right to describe Nathan Leopold's release from
prison; whether it will exercise that right in the face of eloquent
pleas not to do so is a matter of conscience and taste. In general,
our rule is that those who lead part of their lives in public
politicians, entertainers, writers, and others, including celebrated
criminal defendants, who court the public favor in one way or
another have forfeited the right to invoke the common-law
doctrine that "a person who unreasonably and seriously inter
feres with another's interest in not having his affairs known to
others ... Is liable to the other." In England, Randolph
Churchill may raise the roof because the press is, in his view,
too nosey about the private life of Princess Margaret, but liere
there would be no one to defend the proposition that the press
and public should be kept in the dark about the President's
health, as the British public was once kept in the dark about the
health of Randolph Churchill's father. And the same tests of
public interest and relevance that apply in the community of
the nation apply in every subcommunity. To a degree, we can
control our privacy by controlling our mode of existence, and
if we can never retain anything like complete mastery, we can
at least attempt an approach to it. But the costs are heavy and
to many, probably most, Americans excessive.

It is common for Europeans to say that privacy will die in
America because we care nothing about it. "An American has
no sense of privacy/' Bernard Shaw wrote. "He does not know
what it means. There is no such thing in the country." Foreign
ers frequently profess to be scandalized by American institutions
that seem to them destructive of the very idea of privacy the
standard sleeping car, for instance, and the now ubiquitous port
able radio. Alistair Cooke has said that while in England good

^53 Privacy and the Claims of Community

manners consist in not Intruding oneself upon others, here they
consist In being tolerant of those who lead their private life In
public and remaining a good sport about all noisy intrusions. I
think the differences are real but insignificant. The British may
piously talk of the royal family's right to privacy, but their
gutter press makes more lives miserable than ours does. The
French set great store by privacy, but they allow their police
a license that Americans would never tolerate. (The French
police operate on the theory that their work would be quite
impossible If they were not allowed to run mail covers, ransack
telegraph files, and tap wires.) We are perhaps the most gregari
ous and community-minded of people and have developed social
and technological interdependence further than any other, but
it is still, I think, universally acknowledged that the man who
tells another to "mind your own business" has justice on his
side and speaks the common law. We are all in the same fix,
and we all have to strike the same balance between our need for
others and our need for ourselves alone.

The Interlocking Overlappers and
Some Further Thoughts on the
'Tower Situation"

1956

c. WRIGHT MILLS is a distinguished American sociologist who finds
American society as presently organized an inferior piece of
work. In The Power Elite, he says that our political life is
managed by "crackpot realists" who have "constructed a paranoid
reality all their own." What these men do, at home and abroad,
is crazy. Almost nothing about our civilization, a term he would
find unwarranted, seems admirable to him. American democracy
is form without substance. American culture is jejune, inane.
American education? Nothing more or less than a racket to train,
and/or condition, people for industry, commerce, or the state at
public expense. He will not even praise our technology he says
they make better things in Germany and England. From bottom
to top, as Mills sees it, American life is pretty much of a fraud.
The American public is rapidly turning into a jellied American
"mass." The people nowadays exist only to be manipulated.
Mills is certain he knows who does the manipulating, and how,
and why. The "power elite" runs the country. It is "an inter
locking directorate" drawn from among the leading figures in
three spheres: the corporate, the political, and the military. It
is "an intricate set of overlapping cliques [who] share decisions
having at least national consequences. In so far as national
events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them."
He is persuaded that all the really important "events" are
"decided."
254

^55 The Interlocking Overlappers

As a sociologist, Mills is scornful of ideology, which he regards
as a minor function of "position" and "interest." He insists that
he is not constructing an ideological system of his own but merely
a method of analysis. Nevertheless, he may be thought of, at
least in terms of one of his own functions, as a reviser of Marx
ism. Some men hunger for theory as for salt, and those who do
and yet see the inadequacies of Marxism will find in Millsism
a doctrine that satisfies many of their yearnings. Although Mills
offers it not as an explanation of all historical reality but merely
of the present reality in the United States, it imposes order on
seeming chaos; it provides a key to the mysteries, a plot for the
story, a dramatis personae. He nourishes the precious sense of
victimization. His world, like Marx's, is riven. It consists of the
shearers and the shorn, the exploiters and the exploited, those
who have and those who are had. The slaves are pretty much
the same, but the masters are different or, at any rate, more
varied in function and origin. Mills thinks the Marxist term
"ruling class" won't do for our time. " 'Class* is an economic term;
'rule' a political one. The phrase . . . thus contains the theory
that an econC'mic class rules politically." He thinks the contained
theory is two-thirds wrong for the United States at the present
time. It leaves out the political and military orders, which are
of roughly equal importance. Anyway, the members of his "in
terlocking directorate" are "commanders of power unequalled in
human history."

Millsism offers no comforting dialectic. It offers explanation
but no remedy, even through bloody revolution. Unlike Marx,
Mills perceives no significant amount of social tension. If there
ever was a "struggle," it is all over now. He thinks that the
"mass" is intuitively and quite cynically aware of "the power
situation," but it is not greatly troubled by its awareness. It is
not in revolt. The conservative fears of de Tocqueville and
Ortega y Gasset were unfounded. "The bottom of this society,"
he says, "is politically fragmented . . . and increasingly power
less. . . . [The] masses in their full development are sovereign
only in some plebiscitarian moment of adulation to an elite as
authoritative celebrity." I think that by this last sentence he
means that the people are given the illusion of sovereignty by

JUDGMENTS RESERVED *5 6

being allowed to vote for President Eisenhower every four years
and by being kept up to date on the doings of Rita Hayworth
and Grace Kelly. All this is demoralizing.

I believe that Mills' book is at its core mistaken. I also believe
it is symptomatic and important. It has some solid merits, and
these must be acknowledged. By far the greater part of The
Power Elite is descriptive. There is, as Daniel Bell has pointed
out, a Balzacian texture in Mills' accounts of the lives of repre
sentative Americans. When Mills is not choked with indignation
and disgust, he commands a strong and vivid satirical style. More
over, I think he is fairly close to being right in his judgments of
where the power centers of our society are. He is on solid ground
in arguing that there is an almost autonomous political directo
rate in this country today. It is not as unified as he seems to think,
but on what he calls the "big decisions," the big men of rival
factions hammer out agreements that give continuity to major
foreign and domestic policies. (Less hostile critics sometimes point
to this fact as a reflection of the "stability" of American society,
an expression of "consensus.") I .am not so sure that the military
can be set apart from either the corporate or political elements
as easily as Mills thinks they can, but there is no doubt that in
the postwar years, the military establishment has played a huge
and at least semiautonomous role in American life and govern
ment. I believe that the power elite has some important members
Mills does not recognize drawn in part from the "public" he
believes has disappeared, in part from the intelligentsia he re
gards as powerless, in part from the technological and managerial
classes. Still and all, Mills' view of the basic elements in the
power structure is, I think, reasonably sound. What seem to me
to be absurd and destructive are his assumptions and conclusions
about what power is and how it is wielded. He devotes relatively
little space to this, but it is a central matter, and when he does
deal with it he is forthright. His view is summed up in this
passage:

The course of events in our time depends more on a series of human
decisions than on any inevitable fate. ... As the circle of those who
decide is narrowed, as the means of decision are centralized, and the
consequences of decisions become enormous, then the course of great

257 The Interlocking Overlapped

events often rests upon the decisions of determinable circles. . . . [The]
pivotal moment does arrive, and at that moment small circles do decide
or fail to decide. In either case, they are an elite of power. The drop
ping of A-bombs over Japan was such a moment; the decision on
Korea was such a moment; the confusion about Quemoy and Matsu,
as well as before Dien Bien Phu were such moments; the sequence of
maneuvers which involved the United States in World War II was such
a "moment" Is it not true that the history of our times is composed
of such moments?

It Is indeed true that the history of our time Is quite largely
composed of such "moments." They are not the whole story,
of course; history is also the passage o time, the accumulation of
knowledge and anxieties, the development of creeds and institu
tions, and everlasting change some of it planned and intended
and more or less directed, some of it wholly unforeseen and
probably wholly unforeseeable. But the moments Mills men
tions (all of them, interestingly, having to do with war) were
important and they were pivotal. Is it reasonable, though, to
believe, as Mills does, that "the warlords, the corporate chief
tains, and [the] political directorate" determined the Ameri
can responses? I think it is demonstrably unreasonable except
just possibly in the case of our entry Into World War II, an
"event" made of such an "uncountable totality" of other events
(to use a phrase of Sir Isaiah Berlin's) that it would be as difficult
to demonstrate that the "decision" was not made by a particular
group as to determine that it was. The other instances reveal, I
think, the essential inadequacy of Mills' doctrine, and I shall
attempt to show how they do so:*

* The literature of these events has, of course, grown enormously in the five
years since this piece was published in The Progressive. In the late fall of 1961,
for example, we have had yet another account of the decision to use the
atomic bomb Robert C. Batchelder's The Irreversible Decision. A few
months back, Sherman Adams 1 First-Hand Report, discussed elsewhere in
this volume, appeared with some new material on Quemoy and Matsu and
Dienbienphu. I have not read everything In the field, but I have read
quite a bit, and I have come upon nothing that would cause me to alter
the substance of my original comments on Mills' four "moments/' In the
passages dealing with them, I have not used any of the new material either
to qualify what I wrote in 1956 or to amplify it by documentation. For my
purposes here, the original text suffices. The paragraph on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki is based on my reading of the written history available at the time

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 258

HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI: In the first place, very few members
of the power elite knew there was any atomic bomb to be dropped
or not dropped. Harry Truman has taken full personal as well
as Constitutional responsibility for the decision. Though it must
have been about as solitary an act of mind and will as any in
history, we can acknowledge that no man ever acts wholly on
his own wholly unaffected, that is, by his immediate environ
ment and by all that has gone into the making of the human
being he is. In this case, Truman received a certain amount
of advice from an ad hoc committee organized by Henry L.
Stimson, a certifiable member of the power elite. (Stimson was
an "overlapping clique" within his own person, being part of
the corporate power of the nation, part of the political directo
rate, and, as Secretary of War and a former officer, a high figure
in the military command.) Also, Winston Churchill and Joseph
Stalin, a pair of foreigners, were consulted and ratified the
decision in advance. (It is not clear that Stalin knew what he was
ratifying, though if we are to believe Senator McCarthy, he
knew at least as much about the atomic bomb as Harry Truman.)
Truman, however, reports in his memoirs that he was decisively
influenced by the opinions of the nuclear physicists whom he
consulted or who were consulted in his behalf by the Secretary
of War. According to Mills, physicists as intellectuals are power
less in our society and physicists as technicians are mere servants
of the corporations and the military establishment. It is possible,
to be sure, that Truman is no more accurate an appraiser of the
origins of his own behavior than Mills is. But he is surely a bit
closer to the source, and in the absence of compelling evidence
to the contrary, one must, it seems to me, accept his account.
At all odds, the first atomic bombs were dropped on the authority
of one man who was the beneficiary of very sketchy advice from
a handful of other men, most of whom were not, in Mills' terms,
"commanders of power/* In the nature of the case, it was quite
impossible for any "intricate set of overlapping cliques" to have
had much to do with this huge decision.

I wrote. In discussing the other events, I have drawn mainly on information
I acquired as a reporter in Washington when the "events" (I recoil from the
word but use it for want of a better) occurred.

^-59 The Interlocking Overlappers

KOREA: The decision to intervene was made in the course of a
few hours by a very few men, hastily assembled to meet an un
anticipated crisis. Earlier, some of the same men had determined
that the national interest did not call for the defense of Korea.
Some of those involved in both decisions could be regarded as
Important agents of the power elite. (There were no representa
tives of corporate power whose advice was asked or who proffered
it unasked.) Those members of the government* who met with
President Truman on June 24, 1950 were not in the beginning
agreed on what the American response should be. Some differ
ences were overcome during the meeting, some were tabled. The
President again exercised a good deal of Independent judgment,
which is what a President is paid to do. It is interesting to note
that the "decision" could not really have been an effective one
if it had not been for a circumstance which the power elite could
not possibly have arranged the providential boycott by the
Soviet Union of the United Nations Security Council.

QUEMOY AND MATS!): Mills speaks of the "confusions" about
Quemoy and Matsu as a "moment" of "decision." In another
passage, he makes it clear that what he has in mind are the feeble
commitments the Eisenhower administration made to the Chi
nese Nationalists early in 1955 in our treaty with the Republic
of China and in Public Law 4, a Congressional resolution that
authorized the President to take certain actions in the Formosa
Straits which he was already empowered to take by the Con
stitution. The situation, briefly, was this: to honor campaign
pledges and to appease the Asla-firsters, the administration had

* It Is, I think, worth pointing out that they were agreed on the general
framework of policy and strategy. The guidelines had been laid down in the
late forties by the Policy Planning Commission, headed by George F. Kennan,
whom Mills describes in The Power Elite as "a distinguished student of
foreign affairs." Most members of Kennan's staff were public servants with
highly acceptable credentials as intellectuals. They may, of course, have
tailored their own thinking to that of the power elite. I am rather inclined
to think that they, with the help of the President, forced their views upon
the interlocking directorate. After General MacArtfmr's recall in 1951, there
was a fearful brawl over the ends of American policy, and the power elite
seemed split and not split down the middle, for there was surely more
corporate, political, and military power for General MacArthur than against
him. He lost. The views developed by Kennan and his staff prevailed.

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 260

to put out some loud and lofty rhetoric affirming its undying
solidarity with Chiang Kai-shek; to honor reason and to avoid
outraging our allies, the rhetoric had to be gutted, and It was.
The treaty and the resolution committed the United States to
the defense of Formosa, as the home and habitation of the
Republic of China, and pledged the Republic of China not to
attempt the reconquest of its former home and habitation on the
mainland. (In the treaty, Chiang agreed to "refrain from the
threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the pur
poses of the United Nations.") As for Quemoy and Matsu, they
would be defended by the United States only in the event,
according to Public Law 4, that an attack on them had been
determined, by the President of the United States, to be pre
liminary to an attack on Formosa.

Many members of the power elite, including all but one of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to argue the President into a more
militant position. They failed. The reality is quite different from
what Mills supposes it to be. The basic decision taken by this
government was to make an act of disengagement sound like a
declaration of engagement. Once again, it was, or seemed to most
people at the time to be, a victory of the political arm of the
power elite over its military and corporate arms.

DIENBIENPHU: Here is perhaps the oddest case of all. There is
not much doubt that the power elite, to the extent that it had
a single will and a single voice, wished the United States to
intervene in Indochina, at the time of this critical battle.* At
one time or another, the President, the Vice-President, the Secre
tary of State, and, again, all but one of the Joint Chiefs favored
an effort to rescue the French. Among influential people gener
ally, only a few were opposed, openly at any rate. Yet the decision
that really counted was the one taken against the better judgment
of the Washington representatives of the power elite to stay
out of the war.

"It was no historical necessity," Mills writes, "but an argu
ment within a small circle of men that defeated Admiral [Arthur

* I am speaking here of the political and military branches. On matters
of strategy the corporate branch often seems to lack a position. I doubt if it
had one on Dienbienphu.

2<5i The Interlocking Overlappers

W.] Radford's proposal to bomb troops before Dien Bien Phu."
"Historical necessity" is a term Mills constantly uses to cover any
determinism or antideterminism that may be opposed to his
own view. He uses it as a punching bag the way certain ma
terialist and positivist philosophers use "idealism" or "romanti
cism/' In this context, I suppose he means that it was not histori
cally inevitable that things turned out as they did and that an
"argument" turning on calculations of power, logistics, the
strengths and weaknesses of alliances, and strategic priorities
settled the question. To those of us who tried to understand the
decisions and indecisions of the time, however, it appeared that
"public opinion/' a force of negligible significance in the Millsian
system, was of decisive importance. At the start of the controversy,
not only the technicians of diplomacy and military power
within the administration, but a Congressional majority seemed
agreeable to the administration view. Some members supported
it publicly; hardly any opposed it. Then John Foster Dulles went
off to Europe to see what arrangements he could make with the
British and the French. During his absence, something that can,
for the purposes of the moment anyway, be described as "public
opinion" began to take shape. The House of Representatives
went into a brief recess. Congressmen returning from the prov
inces began to report that the people were anything but keen on
saving Indochina from the Communists. Within a week or ten
days, it became almost impossible to find a congressman who
favored sending "American boys" to Indochina to smash Com
munism there. Admiral Radford was as much in favor of inter
vention as he had ever been, but now not even Senator William
F. Knowland, of California, could be induced to declare flatly
in favor of it. The affair began to take on some new dimensions
as a result of the difficulties Dulles met with in London and
Paris, but it is doubtful if these affected the basic American
decision. What did affect it, so far as one could gather in Wash
ington, was the attitude of what Mills describes as the "atomized
and submissive" masses, who, Congressmen discovered while snif
fing at the grass roots during the Easter holidays, were not at all
well disposed to the idea of a shooting war in Indochina. It was
recalled by shrewd Republican politicians that the Eisenhower

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 262

administration's one great popular triumph had been in negotiat
ing an end to the Korean war. The same administration would
lose the political advantage thus gained if it led the country into
another bloody jungle war. The masses, it seemed, were on this
occasion sovereign.

Mills anticipates his critics and dismisses most of them as
obscurantists who see "the power situation ... as a romantic
confusion." Behind his use of "romantic," there seems to lie the
implication that those who see "the power situation" as charac
terized by confusion rather want to see it that way and find
history more entertaining and less demanding intellectually and
morally when they can regard it as mysterious. He charges them
with believing that "history goes on behind men's backs." For
my own part, I find the power situation confusing but hardly
romantic. It is confusing because it is obviously compounded of
many elements which are difficult to isolate, classify, and weigh.
I do not believe that history goes on behind men's backs if
"behind men's backs" means beyond their field of vision. His
tory is the life of the community of men within the framework of
time. It goes on all about us and among us, sometimes within our
sight and comprehension, sometimes especially when crucial
"decisions" are being made by those with the power to make
them beyond them. The truth about it is not, I should think,
undiscoverable. I believe with E. H. Carr that "human actions
have causes which are in principle ascertainable." But I believe
that the truth remains largely undiscovered, largely unascer
tained, and it seems to me no more obscurantist to say this than
to say that the laws of the psyche continue to be somewhat
mysterious. Whether they will remain that way forever or only
for a short while longer is not the point. The point is that they
are in large part mysterious today and so is history, if for no
other reason than that the causes of human action that "are in
principle ascertainable" have yet to be fully ascertained.

It seems to me that it is the cocksure approach of people like
Mills that is basically obscurantist and hostile to the spirit of
objective inquiry and the traditions of the questing intellect.
Mills takes a series of perceptions some of them very sharp and
useful about American society and fashions them into a law of

2^3 The Interlocking Overlappers

that society's operations. No attempt is made at an empirical
testing of the law's soundness of its value, that is to say, in ac
counting for observable developments. He does not examine the
"decisions" he cites to show us how they reveal the decisive
influence of the power elite. All that he tells us is that "a com
pact and powerful elite . . . does now prevail in America/' If
it "prevails," then, it follows, according to Mills' logic, that the
"big decisions" are attributable to it. But of course it is by no
means proved that it does "prevail" in this sense. The only possi
ble way of determining whether it is what Mills says it is would
be by examining the decisions themselves, which Mills never does.
I would suppose that if a man working in any of the physical
sciences offered a doctrine of cause and effect in this way, he
would be hooted out of the academies.

Mills denies that he has come up with a "conspiracy theory,"
but I think that this is exactly what he has done. It is a more
sophisticated conspiracy theory than most and has more elements
of plausibility than most. Nevertheless, it begins as a search for
the responsible, accountable parties in society (this only after
Mills argues to his own satisfaction that in our time, if not in
all others, "the course of events . . . depends on a series of
human decisions"), and its mood is that of a highly intellectual
lynching bee. It is interesting to note that practically all of
the "events" and "decisions" Mills brings up in this book are
ones of which he disapproves. Conspiracy theories are invariably
the work of people concerned almost to the point of obsession
with the "bad" developments in human history those who seem
to have, in Richard Hofstadter's words, "a commitment to hos
tility." So far as I know, no general theory of accountability has
ever been developed to explain the achievements of a civiliza
tion.* And none is the work of people who have much sense of

* Marxism may be regarded as an exception, but Marxism is not in any
meaningful sense a conspiracy theory. Marx's "classes" do not "decide" or
plot or plan or do anything, but behave as the pressures of history compel
them to behave. It has been interesting to note that when Mills, some years
after writing The Power Elite, became enthusiastic about Fidel Castro's Cuba,
he tended to lapse into traditional Marxism. He saw no "interlocking
directorates" or "overlapping cliques" bring Castro to power or maintain
him there. He described the Castro revolution not as a plot but as a move-

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 264

being themselves implicated in history as Mills would be, for
example, if my analysis of Dienbienphu is reasonably sound.
There is in their work no acknowledgment of the possibility
that, as Dr. Bruno Bettelheim has put it, "maybe it [is] not
society that created all these difficulties in man but rather the
hidden, inner, contradictory nature of man that created these
difficulties for society." I do not, of course, suggest that this is
a viable doctrine for a sociologist or historian seeking to under
stand the "power situation" in the United States. I do, however,
think that it is exceedingly difficult to write very helpfully
about any aspect of the human comedy or the human tragedy if
one regards oneself not as part of it but merely as a member
of a small captive audience.

Mills repeatedly speaks of the "irresponsibility" of the people
who decide. He does not mean that they are as individuals
capricious or flip or reckless when they are dealing with matters
of life or death. He means, if I understand him, that they exer
cise power with little of value in the way of tradition or philoso
phy to guide them. "It is not/' he says, "the barbarous irra
tionality of dour political primitives that is the American danger;
it is the respected judgments of Secretaries of State, the earnest
platitudes of Presidents, the fearful self-righteousness of sincere
young American politicians from Sunny California. These men
have replaced mind with platitude, and the dogmas by which
they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counter
balance of mind prevails against them. They have replaced the
responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events
by a maze of public relations." He has John Foster Dulles, Dwight
Eisenhower, and Richard M. Nixon clearly in mind, but he is
as contemptuous of their immediate predecessors and would be
as contemptuous of any imaginable successors.

Is he right in maintaining that they exercise their power within
"the American system of organized irresponsibility"? I think he
is very much in error. I believe that an examination of the
crucial decisions reveals a high degree of responsibility in the

ment of restless, surging humanity struggling to fulfill its needs and aspira
tions. In fairness, though, he claimed no theoretical jurisdiction beyond the
United States.

265 The Interlocking Overlappers

"interpretation of events/' I do not exclude the decision to drop
the first atomic bombs. That act may be one for which the
future, if it gets the chance, may damn Harry Truman and all
the soldiers and scientists around him and all of us who were
part of a society which was not thoroughly outraged. Still, I
do not think the act was irresponsible. The President knew, in
the first place, that he was making a decision of considerable
moral significance. He could not have measured its significance
as clearly as some of us now do, for the decision was taken in the
last days of the preatomic age. He made the decision as a mili
tary commander, responsible for the lives of millions of young
Americans summoned to risk death in the greatest war in history.
As commander in chief, it was his duty to seek estimates of the
probable saving of American lives and the probable loss of
Japanese lives. As a human being, it was his duty to weigh values
of a different sort the effect of this act of war on the nature
of the peace it might bring, the effect of a victory achieved this
way on his country's standing in the world after victory, even the
problem of whether it was right at all to see the problem in
these terms.

Nothing that I have read about Harry Truman's decision sug
gests that he was heedless of these considerations. He approached
his awful dilemma soberly, or as soberly as it was possible for a
man like Harry Truman to be at a time when the world was
awash with blood. He consulted others. In the nature of this
peculiar case, he could not avail himself of all the wisdom in the
country or the world. But he did, with proper humility, consult
men whose judgment he regarded as in many respects superior
to his own. Of their number, only a very few, perhaps five per
cent, counseled him not to use the bomb at all. A few suggested
he give the Japanese a decent warning; others, however, thought
that this might result in an even greater loss of life than an un
announced use of the weapon. In any case, he sought advice of
this sort, and then he acted. I cannot see how he, or those
around him, can be accused of "irresponsibility" or of having
constructed about themselves a "paranoid reality."

The Truman administration took us to war in Korea. The
Eisenhower administration took us to "the brink of war" in the

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 266

Formosa Straits and in Indochina and then withdrew. It hap
pens to be my personal view that both administrations exercised
sound and mature judgment in these three affairs. I think, in
short, that the government was "right/* and I set this down be
cause I realize that a man who regards a judgment as a sound
one could hardly be expected to regard it as irresponsible. But
I think that I also understand the case against all these decisions,
and I think the issue can be limited to responsibility alone.
Those who decided to intervene in Korea believed that inter
vention, if it were successful, would prevent similar aggressions
and that nonintervention would encourage them. A good deal
of the confusion about the Korean war exists because the factor
of time is not given enough weight. It was true that American
policy, before June 22, 1950, held the Republic of Korea to be
outside our system of national security; that policy was abruptly
reversed. But when the North Koreans attacked across the
thirty-eighth parallel, it was the first aggression by a Communist
army in the history of the cold war. Military pressure had been
used before, as it was to be used again. Communist armies had
fought non-Communist armies in wars of an essentially civil
nature. Communist armies brought about the downfall of pre
sumably sovereign governments by their mere presence as occupy
ing forces. But this was the first assault against an international
boundary. Thus, it was less Korea as a tract or even the Seoul
government as the seat of a sovereign power to which policies
and strategies did or did not apply it was the Republic of
Korea as the place where Communist power was seeking to deter
mine whether it could succeed by armed conquest.

There were other considerations, to be sure. The "prestige"
of the United Nations appeared to be involved. Though Korea
was outside our "defense perimeter/* the country was one for
which we had shown a great deal of concern. I can well under
stand believing that none of those things justified our presence
in Korea and that, in fact, it was not justified at all. Walter
Lippmann is only one of many estimable people who have taken
this view. But again, I cannot see the decision to intervene as
anything but one taken with a high degree of responsibility.

26j The Interlocking Overlappers

Indeed, it seems to me that those members of the power elite
who made the decision took a lofty and noble view of their
responsibilities in this world. And a remarkably disinterested
view as well. It is probable that on the night of June 22, 1950,
they were not fully aware of the fact that they were leading the
country into the most hated war in its history and that this might
cost them and their party the control of the country. But all
politicians and most statesmen know that all wars of even short
duration are hated and that they were not marching down any
highway to political success. If anything, their action was a bit
too disinterested in this regard, for a large part of the case against
the Korean war seen from this perspective in time was that it
was so divisive and so productive of hatreds and bitterness that
it might very well have been better never to have become in
volved in it. To a degree, these were the considerations that led
to the Eisenhower administration's avoidance of commitments
in Quemoy and Matsu and in Indochina. Other things were dif
ferent as well: the Eisenhower administration, for all of Dulles's
rhetoric, was more reluctant to assume initiatives of any sort
than the Truman administration, and neither Formosa nor the
French regime in Indochina could be regarded as having so
clear a title to the disputed territories as the Seoul government,
with its U.N. support, had in South Korea. But I am talking not
about the problems but about the quality of responsibility in
their eventual resolution. I am not an admirer of the general
judgment of those in the Eisenhower administration who were
charged with official responsibility in these matters, but I fail
to see how they can be faulted for "irresponsible" decisions.

And, as a matter of fact, it seems to me that it is probably a
general rule in our society and perhaps in most societies that
what are thought of as the "big derisions" those that are al
most immediately crucial, those that involve the nation as a
whole and are known to the world while they are being made
or immediately afterward are more often than not "responsible"
and, within the limitations of the time and the men who seem
to dominate the time, statesmanlike. There are exceptions, of
course (Munich would come to mind and Eisenhower's deter-

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 268

urination of the adequacy of our scientific efforts), but if I were
a C. Wright Mills and were seeking to show the unhappy influ
ence of the interlocking directorate of corporate, political, and
military leaders, I think I would look not to large decisions but
to small ones and to the whole tone and temper of our society
at the present time. But that is another story, and not the one
his work compels us to deal with.

Life and Death and Sentience

1957

ARTHUR KOESTLER'S Reflections on Hanging and Glanville Wil
liams' The Sanctity of Life are notable works of the humane
intelligence. Koestier's book is a tract against capital punish
ment. It has attained historic importance in England, where it
was serialized in the London Observer. It was the leading
abolitionist text in the public and Parliamentary debates that
led to a two-year moratorium on hanging in England and came
very close to ending it forever. Koestler pleads his case, which
would be as pertinent in the forty-two of our states that allow
capital penalties as it is in England, with force and fervor; the
book has none of the mere cleverness one often finds in his
novels and none of the slipperiness one finds in so much of his
political writing. It is not, though, as interesting or as brilliant a
piece of work as Williams*. In a sense, Williams' book runs
counter to Koestler's. Koestler is opposed to killing by due
process of law. Williams says nothing about capital punishment;
his book is, among other things, a plea for modifications of
Anglo-Saxon law that would lead to a more liberal view of a
number of practices that are regarded by many as partaking of
homicide for example, euthanasia, suicide, contraception, abor
tion, and sterilization. The laws that deal with life-and-death
matters only codify certain moral and religious attitudes not
necessarily the prevailing ones toward these grave issues, and
it is to these attitudes that Williams addresses himself. He brings
to the task a great store of knowledge, a fastidious logic, and
style of unfaltering clarity.

In his polemic, Koestler uses every argument but one against

269

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 270

capital punishment; he never invokes the Sixth Commandment
or holds that the destruction of a human spirit is too great a
responsibility for any temporal authority. He never says that
killing is wrong in itself. What he does say is that hanging is
barbarous and sickening; that electrocution and the gas chamber
are no less brutal and repellent; that the death penalty is not
a deterrent to crime; that guiltless men are sometimes put to
death by law, and that execution degrades any society that toler
ates it and every judge who orders it. In the case of murder, he
says, it is a punishment that conspicuously fails to fit the crime;
murder is almost always the work of the deranged and is almost
never a planned pursuit such as, say, larceny of the criminally
bent. (The United States may be an exception. We have had
killers who were professional in every sense of the word.) It is in
some ways remarkable that his book should have had so great
an impact when it makes no use of the argument one would
expect to weigh most heavily on people reared in the Judaeo-
Christian tradition. Yet only once is it suggested that capital
punishment is inherently wrong, a malum in se, regardless of
the technique, regardless of the victim's guilt, regardless of social
or penological considerations, and that suggestion occurs not in
Koestler but in the introduction for American readers, by Pro
fessor Edmond Cahn, of the New York University Law School.
Professor Cahn cites a statement by the late Judge Jerome Frank
that the frequency of judicial error relieves the opponents of
capital punishment of the need to fall back on the argument
that "no man may morally play God/' This argument might be
adduced, Judge Frank said, if we could be sure that every man
under sentence of death had committed the crime for which he
was paying. "But such a thesis need not be considered," he re
marked, with evident relief at having sidestepped an awkward
dispute, "for it assumes the impossible. Experience teaches the
fallibility of court decisions. . . . How dare any society take
the chance of ordering the judicial homicide of an innocent
man?"

The truth is that the modern mind would have a hard time
arguing anything on the premise that human life is sacred. This

27* Life and Death and Sentience

is not because it disbelieves in sacredness or because it holds,
with Mr. Justice Holmes, that the sanctity of life "is a purely
municipal ideal of no validity outside the jurisdiction/' which
is a way of saying that the sanctity of life is simply a legal rather
than an ethical concept. And it is not because life is held in low
esteem; the secular mind, which may see death as an everlasting
nothingness, can build a mystique of earthly existence in which
far more value is placed on the privilege of inhaling and exhaling
than most theologies have ever attached to it. But it would be
almost fatuous, in the middle of the twentieth century, for even
the most devout theologian to say that man cannot or should not
play God provided he means that man should not interfere
with those processes that in earlier centuries were held to be
reserved to Providence. Man must play God, for he has acquired
certain Godlike powers, though not, because it is beyond the
purview of the criminal law, with the most wonder-working of
them all, atomic energy. Science has put into our hands and
politics has required us to grasp firmly instruments that force
a human judgment on whether or not the entire race is to be
executed; even in benign employment, these instruments can
affect the very image of man many millennia hence, and, for
that matter, the duration of all life. In a less awesome but awe
some enough way, modern medicine has been usurping pre
rogatives once held to be God's alone. It has learned to cheat
death not merely by the prolongation of life but by calling
men back to life after several hours on the other shore. The
judge who orders an execution is no more guilty of playing God
than the doctor who, having decided that a human being has
been summoned to eternity too soon, restores him to the world
of time and suffering and sin. Hanging may be more offensive,
but it is not more presumptuous. We have control over creation,
too, and are more and more in a position to determine not only
who shall die and when but who shall be born and when. If it is
Godlike to cut a life or a death short, it is hardly less Godlike
to arrange for a woman innocent of adultery and even wholly
chaste to nourish in her womb and bear a child of whom she is
not the "natural" mother and of whom her husband, if she has

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 272

one, is not in any sense the father. The "natural" father, in fact,
could very well be a man who has died years before his trans
planted and refrigerated sperm fertilized the ovum.

In making his argument, Williams accepts Bertrand Russell's
assertion that moral progress consists of a widening of the bound
aries of human sympathy. That definition leaves much unde
fined. Is sympathy to be forever widened, until there is no lack
of it anywhere? Does sympathy mean toleration? "Moral prog
ress" has a metallic ring, and it is doubtful that men as per
ceptive as Koestler and Williams could find much satisfaction in
being described as "morally progressive." But Russell's concept
does illustrate the basic distinction between Koestler and
Williams. By a literal application of the concept, Koestler
qualifies easily for a place in the moral vanguard; he is begging
mercy, the active stage of sympathy, for murderers. Williams'
plea would be more difficult to justify, for the world is full o
people of unassailable morality who would say that he is really
asking us to withhold sympathy from many human beings whom
our laws now protect. He favors the compulsory sterilization of
the feeble-minded, the epileptic, and persons with certain heredi
tary physical defects. He would permit the destruction of griev
ously malformed infants. He thinks it should be "permissible
both morally and legally so to define a human being as to exclude
the grosser sports of nature." While he may share Koestler's view
that one murder does not justify another, he would have the
criminal law make infanticide a lesser form of homicide an
attitude that plays hob with Russell's dictum, since it could be
described as a denial of sympathy to the victim.

Koestler argues against hanging with a revolutionist's ardor
and the arid logic of a mere reformer. Minus its rhetoric, which
is sometimes quite splendid, his tract is a series of pragmatic
propositions of the sort he might work up to oppose anything
he chanced to regard as unsound public policy. It cannot, how
ever, be this purely municipal spirit that accounts for the aboli
tionist passion that has become for him, at least in part, a moral
substitute for the Bolshevism that fired his imagination in his
youth. (In 1936, he acquired a certain concern with capital
punishment when, as a young Communist, he spent three months

275 */* and Death and Sentience

under sentence of death In one of General Franco's jails.) For
while the ending of capital punishment may commend itself to
many of us, it is not the kind of crusade that justifies and sup
ports the fervor that moves Koestler. As Koestler himself re
marks, the only direct beneficiaries in England are the "thirteen
wretches a year" normally sentenced to death. This is but one
inhabitant in three million, which is not very much, particularly
if one believes that murderers, on the whole, are a poor lot.
What, after all, is so important about ending capital punish
ment? Stricter traffic controls or increased appropriations for
cancer research would save many, many more lives, and it seems
nonsensical to imply, as Koestler does, that the death penalty
compromises before the rest of the world the moral positions
of the countries that impose it. (Oddly, the three most humane
of modern Western societies Britain, France, and the United
States are almost the only ones of those societies who still keep
the category of capital crime on their books.) Actually, the
Sixth Commandment is at the bottom of Koestler' s case. The
unstated assumption of this worldling's argument is that there is
something profane, something supremely wicked about the tak
ing of any human life. Though he advances only the standard
municipal claims in support of abolition, one feels that his
position would be the same in the face of incontrovertible evi
dence that hanging is an effective deterrent to murder. Koestler
may be a worldling, but his passion has a transcendental base.
This situation, as Glanville Williams points out, is not at all un
common. "Even the modern infidel," he says, "tends to give his
full support to the belief that it is our duty to regard all human
life as sacred, however disabled or worthless or repellent the indi
vidual may be."

Williams, however, does not give his full support to the op
posite belief. He, too, may oppose hanging, but he could not
do it with Koestler's zeal, for he thinks it is urgent common
sense to measure the value of life both qualitatively and quan
titatively. Life is feeling and awareness, not mere animation,
and the more highly developed the feeling and awareness, the
more deserving a particular life is of respect and protection.
Life is also the community of the presently living, to whom the

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 2,^4

problem of numbers the size of families, for example, or the
relation of population to resources can be of crucial importance.
In a general way, Western man acts on these views even when
his religions and his criminal laws run contrary to them. We
reserve our severest penalties, such as hanging, for those who
destroy or tamper with a life that is highly sentient and do not
apply them in cases of low degree of sentience. Infanticide has
seldom been looked upon as murder; in some societies it has
been encouraged, in others it has been tolerated. The destruction
of a life in a declining state of sentience is also given a large
degree of tolerance. In no Western jurisprudence is it conceivable
that a doctor who relieves a dying patient's pain by a dose of
anodyne that ends pain forever will suffer the full vengeance
of the law.

Williams' book is in part an analysis of religious and legal
estimates of the value of human life and in part a plea for the
frank acceptance of municipal standards. The community of
the living is obliged to be concerned with community problems.
If life is sentience, then sentience must be respected. Williams
would establish a man's right to put an end to what he chooses
to regard as his own agony by suicide the unsuccessful attempt
at which is now, preposterously, a crime in most Anglo-Saxon
jurisdictions or by requesting euthanasia. Williams would also
preserve the right of the community of the living to limit its
numbers and to regulate, as far as possible, its quality by birth
control, by sterilization, and by artificial insemination. Accord
ing to statisticians in whom he has confidence, a laissez-faire
eugenic, or perhaps even dysgenic, policy is almost bound to
lead (through the tendency of the less sentient to be more pro
lific) to a decline in average intelligence as high as one per cent
a generation and this in a society that is already putting an
enormous strain on its reserves of intelligence. In a way, the
prospect of a society that took matters of life and death into its
own hands as coldly as Williams would have it do is a terrifying
one; reading him, one often has the feeling that it would be
better and safer if we clung blindly to the simple precepts em
bodied in our law than if we settled coldly upon the idea that
we ourselves are the makers of values. What Williams demon-

275 Life and Death and Sentience

strates, though, and what the worldling Koestler illustrates, is
that the best of our secular minds have treasured life fully as
much as the best of our transcendental minds. Who wrote a
tract that helped bring an end to hanging in England? Arthur
Koestler. A little over a century ago, English children were being
hanged for petty thefts, and today there is mercy even for the
merciless. And the burden of Glanville Williams' book is that
the boundaries of our sympathies for all those who share our
state of being should be immensely widened.

* The Conscience of Arthur Miller

1957

"i WILL PROTECT my sense of myself/' Arthur Miller told the
House Committee on Un-American Activities when he declined
to name some people, mainly writers, he had met at various
gatherings presumed by the Committee and by Miller to have
been arranged by Communists. He did not invoke the Fifth
Amendment. Had he done so, he would probably have escaped
any difficulties with the law though sharp questioning on the
possibility of self-incrimination might have denied him this
refuge. (Merely to have encountered Communists in the thirties
and forties was never held to be incriminating, even in Mc
Carthy's fifties. And Miller had already talked a great deal about
his own political past.) Instead, he invoked, in defense of what
he claimed was his right to be unresponsive, the First Amend
ment, which protects freedom of speech and in recent years has
also been held to protect the necessary corollary of free speech,
free non-speech. "I could not use the name of another person and
bring trouble on him," Miller said. The refusal led to a con
viction for contempt of Congress. The presiding judge found
Miller's motives "commendable" but felt constrained to hold his
action legally indefensible.

"I will protect my sense of myself" legalities aside, this was
Miller's basic statement of his own case, as he evidently viewed
the matter. As a rule, a writer's sense of himself is to be pro
jected as well as protected. It becomes, through publication (or,
in his case, production), a rather public affair. In fact, I think,
it was only in a rather narrow meaning of the term that he was
protecting any "sense of himself." He was defending, under the

277 The Conscience of Arthur Miller

threat of a year In jail and a fine of a thousand dollars, his view
that It is unmanly and irresponsible and undemocratic and
even unpatriotic to be an "informer." Actually, what he saw
as the testing of Ms integrity the challenge to his "sense of
himself* was a question Involving not himself but others. ("I
could not use the name of another person . . .") Of himself,
of Arthur Miller, noted playwright, he talked freely, not to say
garrulously. He chatted, almost gaily, about his views before
the war; his views during the war; his views after the war; about
the case of Ezra Pound; about Ella Kazan, his collaborator both
in left-wing politics and in the theater, who, unlike Miller, had
provided the Committee with the "names" by which It sets such
great store. He confided his views of Congressional investigations,
of the Smith Act, and of just about anything in which the
Congressmen showed any interest. When he was asked why he
wrote "so morbidly, so sadly/' the author of Death of a Salesman
responded courteously and patiently rather as if It were the
question period following a paid lecture before a ladles* club.
His self-esteem was offended only when he was asked to identify
others.

Thus, one might say, it was really a social or political ethic
that he was protecting, while of his sense of himself he gave
freely. In legal terms, this might be a quibble, for there Is no
reason why a man should not have a right to his own definition
of self-respect. In a literary sense, It is not a quibble, for Miller
is a writer of a particular sort, and It was In character for him
to see things this way. He is, basically, a political, or "socially
conscious" writer. He is a fortunate survivor of the thirties, and
his values derive mostly from that decade. He is not much
of a hand at exploring or exploiting his own consciousness. He
is not inward. He is more Ibsen than Strindberg. He writes at
times with great power, but not with a style of his own, and
those who see his plays can leave them with little or no sense of
the author as a man. He Is not, in fact, much concerned with
individuality of any sort. This is not an adverse judgment; it is
a distinction, or an attempt at one. What interests Miller and
what he can often convey with force is the crushing impact of
society upon its members. His human beings are always on the

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 278

anvil, awaiting the hammer, and the act that landed him in his
present trouble was the attempt to shield two or three of them
from the hammer's blow. (It was, of course, a symbolic act, a
gesture, for Miller knew very well that the Committee knew
all about the men he was asked to identify. It already had their
names and didn't need them from him. He could not really
shield; he could only assert the shielding principle.) What he
was protecting was, in any case, a self-esteem that rested upon
a social rule or principle or ethic.

One could almost say that Miller's sense of himself is the
fashionable principle that holds "informing" to be the ultimate
in human wickedness. It is certainly a recurrent theme in his
writing. In The Crucible, his play about the Salem witchcraft
trials, his own case is so strikingly paralleled as to lend color
though doubtless not truth to the view that his performance
in Washington was a case of life paying art the sincere flattery
of imitation. To save his life, John Proctor, the hero, makes a
compromise with the truth. He confesses, falsely, to having
trafficked with Satan. "Did you see the Devil?" the prosecutor
asks him. "I did/ 1 Proctor says. He recognizes the character of his
act, but this affects him little. "Good, then it is evil, and I
do it," he says to his wife, who is shocked. He has reasoned that
a few more years on earth are worth this betrayal of his sense
of himself. (It is not to be concluded that Proctor's concession to
the mad conformity of the time parallels Miller's testimony, so
far as it went, for Proctor had never in fact seen the Devil,
whereas Miller had in fact seen Communists, plenty of them.
Moreover, Miller did not regard the Communists he had seen
as devils.) The prosecutor will not let Proctor off with mere
self-incrimination. He wants names; the names of those Proctor
has seen with the Devil. Proctor refuses; he does not balk at a
self-serving lie, but a self-serving lie that involves others will not
cross his lips. He will speak of the Devil but not of the Devil's
and his friends. "I speak my own sins," he says, either hyperboli-
cally or hypocritically, since the sins in question are a fiction.
"I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it." He is hanged,
a martyr.

^79 The Conscience of Arthur Miller

In his latest play, A View from the Bridge, Miller returns to
the theme, this time with immense wrath. He holds that con
science indeed humanity itself is put to the final test when
a man is asked to "inform." Eddie, a longshoreman in the grip
of a terrible passion for his teen-age niece, receives generous
amounts of love and sympathy from those around him up to the
moment he is beguiled into tipping off the Immigration officers
to the illegal presence in his home of a pair of aliens. His lust
for the child has had dreadful consequences for the girl herself,
for the youth she wishes to marry, and for Eddie's wife. It has
destroyed Eddie's sense of himself and made a brute of him.
Yet up to the moment he "informs'* he gets the therapy of af
fection and understanding from those he has hurt the most.
But once he turns in the aliens, he is lost; he crosses the last
threshold of iniquity upon becoming an informer. "In the
garbage can he belongs," his wife says. "Nobody is gonna talk
to him again if he lives to a hundred."

A View from the Bridge is not a very lucid play, and it may
be that in it Miller, for all of his wrath, takes a somewhat less
simple view of the problem of the informer than he does in
The Crucible. There is a closing scene in which he appears to
be saying that even this terrible transgression may be under
stood and dealt with in terms other than those employed by
Murder, Incorporated. I think, though, that the basic principle
for which Miller speaks is far commoner in Eddie's and our
world than it could have been in John Proctor's. The morality
that supports it is post-Darwinian. It is more available to those
not bound by the Christian view of the soul's infinite precious-
ness or of the body as a temple than it could have been to pre-
Darwinian society. Today, in most Western countries, ethics
derive mainly from society and almost all values are social.
What we do to and with ourselves is thought to be our own
affair and thus not, in most circumstances, a matter that involves
morality at all People will be found to say that suicide, for a
man or woman with few obligations to others, should not be
judged harshly, while the old sanctions on murder remain.
Masturbation, once known as "self-abuse," receives a tolerance

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 280

that fornication does not quite receive. A man's person and his
"sense of himself*' are disposable assets, provided he chooses to
see things that way; sin is only possible when we involve others.
Thus, Arthur Miller's John Proctor was a modern man when,
after lying about his relations with the Devil, he said, "God in
heaven, what is John Proctor, what is John Proctor? I think it is
honest, I think so. I am no saint." It is doubtful if anyone in the
seventeenth century could have spoken that way. The real John
Proctor surely thought he had an immortal soul, and if he had
used the word "honest" at all, it would not have been in the
sophisticated, relativistic way in which Miller had him use it.
He might have weakened sufficiently to lie about himself and
the Devil, but he would surely not have said it was "honest" to
do so or reasoned that it didn't really matter because he was
only a speck of dust. He was speaking for the social ethic which
is Arthur Miller's and he resisted just where Miller did, at
"informing," at supplying "names."

It is, I think, useful to look rather closely at Miller's social
ethic and at what he has been saying about the problems of
conscience, for circumstances have conspired to make him a
leading symbol of the militant, risk-taking conscience in this
period. I do not wish to quarrel with the whole of his morality,
for much of it I share as do, I suppose, most people who have
not found it possible to accept any of the revealed religions.
Moreover, I believe, as Judge Charles F. McLaughlin did, that
the action Miller took before the Committee was a courageous
one. Nevertheless, I think that behind the action and behind
Miller's defense of it there is a certain amount of moral and
political confusion. If I am right, then we ought to set about
examining it, lest conscience and political morality come to be
seen entirely in terms of "naming names" a simplification which
the House Un-American Activities Committee seems eager to
foist upon us and which Miller, too, evidently accepts.

A healthy conscience, Miller seems to be saying, can stand
anything but "informing." On the one hand, this seems a
meager view of conscience. On the other, it makes little political
sense and not a great deal of moral sense. Not all "informing"
is bad, and not all of it is despised by the people who frequently

2 8i The Conscience of Arthur Miller

speak of it as despicable.* The question of guilt is relative.
My wife and I, for example, instruct our children not to tattle
on one another. But if either of us saw a hit-and-run driver
knock over a child or even a dog, we would, if we could, take
down the man's license number and turn him in to the police.
Even in the case of children, we have found it necessary to
modify the rule so that we may be quickly advised if anyone is
in serious danger of hurting himself or another. (The social
principle again.) Proctor, I think, was not stating a fact when he
said, "I cannot judge another" nor was Miller when he said
substantially the same thing. For the decision not to inform
demands the judging of others. "They think to go like saints/'
Proctor said in favorable judgment upon those he claimed he
could not judge, and Miller must have had something of the
sort in mind about the writers he refused to discuss. He reasoned,
I have no doubt, that their impulses were noble and that they
had sought to do good in the world. We refuse to inform, I
believe, either when we decide that those whose names we are
asked to reveal are guilty of no wrong or when we perceive that
what they have done is no worse than what we ourselves have
often done. Wherever their offenses are clearly worse as in the
case of a hit-and-run driver or a spy or a thief we drop the ban.
If the position taken by Miller were in all cases right, then it
would seem wise to supplement the Fifth Amendment with one
holding that no man could be required to incriminate another.
If this were done, the whole machinery of law enforcement
would collapse; it would be simply impossible to determine
the facts about a crime. Of course, Congressional committees
are not courts, and it might be held that such a rule would be

* In the summer of 1961, some juvenile gangs in New York undertook a
campaign of guerrilla warfare against the police. Concrete blocks were
dropped from roofs and windows on prowl cars; packs of delinquents assaulted
foot patrolmen on the streets. The New York Post, a liberal newspaper which
had supported Arthur Miller in 1957 and which in general had urged that
these difficult youths be treated with kindness and consideration, felt that
things had gone much too far. It deplored the resistance to "informing" that
made it impossible to identify and punish the guilty. "When witnesses," it
said in an angry editorial, "who can identify the assailants refuse to cooperate
in tracking them down, a serious sickness is in the air." Obviously, it all
depends.

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 282

useful in their proceedings. It would be useful only if we wished
to destroy the investigative power. For we live, after all, in a
community, in the midst of other people, and all of our prob
lems certainly all of those with which Congress has a legitimate
concern involve others. It is rarely possible to conduct a serious
inquiry of any sort without talking about other people and
without running the risk of saying something that would hurt
them. We can honor the conscience that says, "I speak my own
sins. I cannot judge another." But those of us who accept any
principle of social organization and certainly those of us who
believe that our present social order, whatever changes it may
stand in need of, is worth preserving cannot make a universal
principle of refusing to inform. If any agency of the community
is authorized to undertake a serious investigation of any of our
common problems, then the identities of others names are
of great importance. What would be the point of investigating,
say, industrial espionage if the labor spies subpoenaed refused
to identify their employer? What would be the point of investi
gating Teapot Dome or Dixon-Yates if it were impossible to
learn the identity of the businessmen and government officials
involved?

The joker, the source of much present confusion, lies in the
matter of seriousness. Miller and his attorneys have argued that
the names of the writers Miller had known were not relevant
to the legislation on passports the Committee was supposed to
be studying. This would certainly seem to be the case, and one
may regret that Judge McLaughlin did not accept this argu
ment and acquit Miller on the strength of it. Nevertheless, the
argument really fudges the central issue, which is that the
Committee wasn't really investigating passport abuses at all
when it called Miller before it. It was only pretending to do so.
The rambling talk of its members with Miller was basically
frivolous, and the Un-American Activities Committee has almost
always lacked seriousness. In this case, as Mary McCarthy has
pointed out, the most that it wanted from Miller was to have
him agree to its procedure of testing the good faith of witnesses
by their willingness to produce names, names, names. It was on
this ground that Miller was morally justified in his refusal.

283 The Conscience of Arthur Miller

Still, Miller's principle, the social ethic he was defending,
cannot be made a universal rule or a political right. For it is one
thing to say, as I am saying now, that the House Un-American
Activities Committee is frivolous and mischievous and politically
contemptible and another to assert before the law that such a
judgment gives a witness the right to stand mute before the
Committee without being held in contempt. As matters stand
today, Miller was plainly in contempt. At one point in The
Crucible, John Proctor is called upon to justify his failure to
attend the church of the Rev. Mr. Parris and to have his children
baptized by that divine. He replies that he disapproves of the
clergyman. "I see no light of God in that man," he says. "That
is not for you to decide/' he is told. "The man is ordained,
therefore the light of God is in him/' And this, of course, is
the way the world is. In a free society, any one of us may arrive
at and freely express a judgment about the competence of duly
constituted authority. But in an orderly society, no one of us
can expect the protection of the law whenever we decide that a
particular authority is unworthy of co-operation. We may stand
by the decision, and we may seek the law's protection, but we
cannot expect it as a matter of right. There are many courses of
action that may have a sanction in morality and none whatever
in law. Contempt of Congress is a punishable offense. It is also
an attitude that reason and honor may demand of a man. But
the fact that Congress or certain Congressmen may seem con
temptible does not in itself deprive the institution of its power
or its Constitutional function in the American scheme of things.

Yet the law is intended to be, among other things, a codification
of morality and of common sense, and we cannot be pleased with
the thought that a man should be penalized for an act of con
scienceeven when his conscience may seem not as fully in
formed by reason as it ought to be. In a much more serious
matter, war, we excuse from participation those who say their
consciences will permit them no part in it. One of the reasons
the order of American society seems worth preserving is that it
allows, on the whole, a free play to the individual's moral judg
ments. In recent years, Congressional committees have posed the
largest single threat to this freedom. The issues have often been

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 284

confused by the bad faith of witnesses on the one hand and
committee members on the other. Still and all, the problem is a
real one, as the Miller case shows. If there is not sufficient latitude
for conscience in the law, then there ought to be. It would be
irresponsible, I think, simply to permit anyone who chooses to
withhold whatever information he decides he does not care to
impart. The Fifth Amendment seems to go as far as is generally
justified in this direction. Changes in committee procedures have
often been urged, but it is doubtful if much clarification of a
problem such as this can be written into rules and bylaws. The
problem is essentially one of discretion and measurement; it is,
in other words, the most difficult sort of problem and one of the
kind that has, customarily, been dealt with by the establishment
of broad and morally informed judicial doctrines.

On August 7, 1958, the Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington
unanimously ordered Miller's acquittal. It proclaimed no doctrine
on the rights or privileges of conscience. It held that the House
Committee had not given the witness sufficient warning of the
consequences of failure to respond. Miller was the better off by
$500 (this and a suspended sentence of one year were the
penalties that had been imposed by the Federal Court) and by
a record that shows no conviction for contempt of Congress.

Communists and Intellectuals

1953

INTELLECTUALS seem to delight in blaming their own class or
caste or callings for the malfimctionings of society and partic
ularly for its political aberrations and tyrannies. Sometimes
their guilt is held to be a product of their apathy and indifference
(from Athens to the Weimar Republic), sometimes a product of
their excessive or mistaken interventions (from Jacobin France*
to the Paris of Julien Bendaf). McCarthyism and the devel
opments that have encouraged its lamentable rise and spread
have brought on a new wave of intellectual self-reproach in this
country. A number of intellectuals are angry at other intellec
tuals. One of the angriest is the poet and historian Peter Viereck.
A couple of years ago, in a widely discussed article entitled
"Bloody-Minded Professors"! and more recently in his book
The Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals > he has given his
brethren in the arts, the academies, and the learned professions
such a beating about the ears as they have not received in a
generation. Viereck would have us believe that a direct cause of
the death of freedom in many parts of the postwar world has
been the affinity a certain number of Western intellectuals had
for Communism in the early thirties and forties. "The misinter-

* Je suis tombe a terre
La Nez dans le ruisseau
C'est la faute a Voltaire,
G'est la faute a Rousseau.

(Anon. Circa 1792).
f La Trahison des Clercs, 1927.

^Confluence, September 1951. The title is by courtesy of Winston
Churchill, who attributed the rise of Communism to "a gang of ruthless
and bloody-minded professors."

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 286

pretation of Soviet world-conquest," he says, "by certain of the
best educated non-oxen of the West did not merely affect the
realm of abstract theory. It affected the course of actual history."
Maybe. Since I tend to believe, with Tolstoy as my leading
fellow traveler, that in all probability (a word I do not use
lightly) everything affects everything in history, I cannot take
the view that the "educated non-oxen" played no role at all.
But I cannot go along with Viereck, who maintains that Ameri
can resistance to Soviet aggression would have stiffened far
earlier and thus have been far more effective if it had not been
for the sapping of morale by intellectuals whose own morale had
been sapped by Stalinism and other debilitating influences, many
of these latter originating in Bohemia.

Viereck is one of the more passionate and hard-breathing of
the modern school of "C'est la faute a Voltaire/' but he states the
case pretty much as most of them are stating it nowadays, and he
does recognize Senator McCarthy for the charlatan he is. I
propose to deal critically with some of his contentions. It is
probably to my advantage to say that I propose to offer no
defense of the American intellectuals who embraced Communism
in the thirties or forties or to argue that what they did had no
bearing on the course of events. The American intellectuals who
succumbed to Stalinism (if 1 qualify as an intellectual, then I was
one of their number for a brief but inexcusably long period in
the late thirties*) damaged this country and the idea of a free
and open society. They did this, I believe, largely by damaging
themselves and by pouring bilge into our culture. But I find it
hard indeed, almost impossible to believe that they delayed
the formulation of the Truman Doctrine or the North Atlantic
Treaty, which is Viereck's astonishing and undocumented con
tention. I find what he says astonishing not because I under
estimate the importance of ideas or their purveyors but, I think,
because I estimate more highly than he does the world's great
weariness at the end of the war and the lag in perception of any
society of men most conspicuously a democratic society. (I
would think it worth pointing out that, judging from evidence

* I was an associate editor of the New Masses, a Communist weekly, from
March. 1938 to September 1939.

287 Communists and Intellectuals

available at the moment, neither the Truman Doctrine nor
NATO came too late. Both seem to have worked.) In any case,
my hope is to set down a few things that may help keep the
record straight.

Viereck writes: "Totalitarianism has had an innate attraction
for an able minority of intellectuals as far back as Plato." And;
"Intellectuals are more susceptible to the totalitarian lure than
any group in America."

"As far back as Plato" is a bit further back than I see any need
to go. And if we are to take Miss Hannah Arendt's word for it,
"totalitarianism" belongs to our time, not Plato's. Viereck,
though, is insisting that there is some connection between what
he regards as the affinity of modern intellectuals for modern
totalitarian systems and the association of intellectuals of the
past with some of its less respectable power systems. No doubt
this is so. I would assume that there has never been a tyranny
that has failed to attract support as well as opposition from a
certain number of intellectuals. Every society, wicked or other
wise, has an organizing principle. Organizing principles are the
concern of intellectuals, wicked or otherwise. Both Voltaire and
Dr. Johnson said that there was no idea i.e., no organizing
principle so ridiculous but that it could not find defenders
i.e., Viereck's "able minority." The notion, though, that there
is any binding tie between, let us say, the scholastics who took
part in the Inquisition and the American intellectuals who have
been Communists, is, in my view, pure scholasticism itself. And
if "totalitarianism" can be stretched to describe illiberal systems
that predate fascism and Communism, then I cannot think of a
time in American or Western history when even a significant
minority of genuine intellectuals have been on the totalitarian
side.

The second of Viereck's statements that intellectuals of the
recent past have been "more susceptible to the totalitarian lure
than any other group in America" seems to me somewhat less
than half true. Although a considerable number of American
intellectuals were fetched by Stalinism in the thirties and early
forties, there was a large difference between the quality of minds

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 288

attracted in those two periods. I think it is entirely reasonable to
say that it was only in the earlier decade that any substantial
number of really first-rate people people, that is, fit to represent
the intellectual community were under Communist influence.
And even then, the number who resisted Stalinism probably ex
ceeded the number who succumbed. Those who remained in the
Communist movement after the Moscow trials and the ' Soviet-
Nazi pact or who entered it during the war years were for the
most part intellectuals manque people whose intellectual pre
tensions outran their performances. The Stalinist fever assailed
the literary and academic communities in the mid-thirties and
had about run its course by 1940; after the Nazi attack on Russia
in June 1941, it became mildly epidemic in Hollywood and in
certain other centers of the lively arts. There was a small revival
in academic and religious circles but nothing to be compared
to the movement of the thirties. I can think of a dozen or so
fairly serious contributions to American culture made by people
under Communist influence in the thirties; I cannot think of one
in the forties.

The distinction I have in mind is made by Eric Hoffer in The
True Believer. "Whence come the fanatics?" Hoffer asks, answer
ing, "Mostly from the ranks of the non-creative men of words.
The most significant division of men of words is between those
who can find fulfillment in creative work and those who cannot.
The creative man of words, no matter how bitterly he may
criticize and deride the existing order is actually attached to the
present." And Hoffer goes on to point out that it is the uncreative
sort who cling to their roles as true believers long after there is
nothing left to believe in. It was men of this sort, barren and
bitter, who continued to lend themselves to Communism in the
forties and who, in considerably diminished numbers, do so
today. They represent little apart from their own inadequacies.*

* I believe I overlooked another crucial distinction. The noncreative men
of words did constitute a large manpower pool for the Communists, but
dupes also came in large numbers from the ranks of intellectuals whose
principal currency was something other than words. I am thinking, on the
one hand, of scientists like Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo and, on the
other, of artists like Pablo Picasso and David Siqueiros. It would be foolish
to speak of such men as intellectuals manqud. They simply come from differ-

289 Communists and Intellectuals

In the thirties, there were at least two totalitarian lures. The
one that seemed to pose the greater threat to freedom and decency
had no intellectual following at all in this country. On the
contrary, American intellectuals, almost to a man, abhorred fas
cism, and if a number of them lent themselves to a tyranny quite
as evil, it was in large measure their loathing of fascism that led
them to do so. This did not justify or exonerate them. Many of
our sins are functions of our virtues, and often these are the
very worst kind. But the fact remains and the present genera
tion ought to have a clear understanding of it that it was
precisely when Communism appeared to be in militant opposi
tion to totalitarianism that its attracting powers were greatest;
and the point at which intellectuals in large numbers abandoned
it was as a rule the point at which it became clear to them that
Communism was itself totalitarian.*

Viereck says that American intellectuals, in 1953, "have still
not rejected . . . the most successful Communist hoax ever
perpetrated: the confusion of criminal deeds with free thought/*
And he speaks of "the literary defenders of [Alger] Hiss,
[Judith] Coplon, and the eleven convicted Communist leaders"
as though there exists some school or sizable bloc of literary
people that can thus be characterized.

So far as I know, Alger Hiss is the only one of those Viereck
mentions who has had any defenders who could reasonably be
described as "literary." Only the Communist press, which is not
literary and often is not even literate, has defended the Com
munist leaders convicted under the Smith Act. (It has had little
to say about Hiss and nothing to say, I believe, about Miss
Coplon.) There is only one case I am aware of that of Julius

ent intellectual realms. Their knowledge and gifts in dealing with social and
political ideas may be as underdeveloped as those of the verbally noncreative
of whom Hoffer spoke. There were more illustrious members of the group I
overlooked abroad than in this country, but this country was not lacking in
them in the forties.

* A history of defections would be told largely in terms of the events that
revealed totalitarian drives: the Kronstadt Rebellion, the banishment of
Leon Trotsky, the enforced famines of the early thirties, the Moscow trials,
the Soviet-Nazi pact, the Stalinist pogroms of the early fifties, the crushing
of the East German and Hungarian revolts.

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 290

and Ethel Rosenberg in which it could be maintained that
"the confusion of criminal deeds with free thought" had any
thing to do with sympathy for the accused. It is curious that
Viereck overlooks it. To be sure, the demonstrations for the
Rosenbergs took the form of protests against the death penalty.
Some of those who wished the Rosenbergs spared may have had
genuine doubts about their guilt or the fairness of their trial.
But in a good many cases, one can be sure, the doubts as to guilt
arose from the confusion of which Viereck speaks. And in some
cases, of course, there was neither confusion nor doubt, but a
conviction that the "criminal deed" was fathered by noble
thoughts.

So far as the others are concerned, I know of no defense of
them in their role as Communist agents. I think that Viereck
himself is confusing disapproval of the Smith Act under which
the Communist leaders were convicted with sympathy for the
politics of those defendants. I happen myself to believe that they
were convicted for what might best be described as a malevolent
exercise of free thought and not for anything that in sound usage
or American law deserves to be called a "conspiracy." But dis
approval of the law need not breed sympathy for its victims.

It is a fact that a large part of the American intellectual
community refused for some time to entertain seriously even the
possibility that Alger Hiss could have been guilty as charged, and
there are still people who cannot bring themselves to confront
the formidable evidence the government brought forth. But
Viereck confuses disbelief in Hiss's guilt with sympathy for the
crime of which he was accused. (I am putting aside as a techni
cality the fact that he was indicted for perjury rather than, be
cause of protection by the statute of limitations, espionage.) This,
to be sure, does not invalidate Viereck's charge that many of
Hiss's defenders were, as John Dos Passos put it, parties to the
unlovely spectacle of "the moral lynching of Whittaker Cham
bers." Those people, most of whom knew Hiss not as a man but
as a symbol of what they thought of as their own nicely ordered
world, were smug and prideful in their own values, and those
values got in the way of their understanding of evil.

But their inability to believe that Hiss had been a spy was a

291 Communists and Intellectuals

very different thing from defending him as a spy, and it is the
kind of difference that one is distressed to see a serious historian
not make. It was not because many people sympathized with
Communist agents that they defended Hiss and reviled Cham
bers; it was because they thought Hiss had been unjustly accused
of being so loathsome a thing as a spy and accused, as it
happened, by a man who owned up to having been one. They
felt, most of them, that Hiss's virtue was as secure as their own
because Hiss happened to be peculiarly one of their own. Most
of them saw Chambers not as an anti-Communist but as a
Communist apostate, and it was almost as much his having once
been a Communist spy as his current state of apostasy that
turned them against him before they had weighed his testimony.
What worked in Hiss's favor, what bred incredulity about his
guilt, was the gentility of his background and his associations:
Harvard, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., old-line law offices, John
Foster Dulles, the Carnegie Endowment, and success. It was not
the destructive, revolutionary instincts he appealed to but the
deeply bourgeois ones.

Viereck is almost at one with the Yahoos in identifying Com
munism with the avant garde. American intellectuals, he says,
"naturally know best the society they have studied best. . . .
This is a society seen through the colored glasses of a literary
(at first nonpolitical) anti-bourgeois crusade/' He goes on to
speak of the "familiar blend of an 'aristocratic* snob in art and a
fellow-traveling 'progressive' in politics/' and he associates the
attitudes of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Henry Miller with those
of the Communist intellectual. Before he is through, he has
managed to involve Joyce, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Spengler, Rim
baud as ancestors of his Bloody-Minded Professors.

Nothing, it would seem to me, could be wider of the mark. The
American intellectuals who fell hardest for Communism were
men not of avant-garde tastes but of tastes rather safe and con
ventional.. Scratch a Communist today and you will find not an
admirer of Rimbaud but of John Greenleaf Whittier, not a
student of Eliot but of Carl Sandburg. (I imply here no political
judgment of either American.) Communists do not read Joyce or

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 2 9 2

Flaubert but Jack London and Upton Sinclair. How Mr. Viereck
can associate either mandarin or avant-garde literature with
Communists or fellow travelers is beyond me, particularly when
he seems to be well aware of the fact that the cultural tone they
set in the thirties (and there can be little doubt that they did
set a tone in that period) was deplorable because it was cheap and
metallic and strident. Here, as in the Soviet Union, Communist
writing and Communist painting and Communist thinking have
been corny and vulgar and innocent of any subtlety.

Historically, the fact is that mandarin and avant-garde tastes
were a protection against the Communist heresy though one
could hardly say that they strengthened sound political judg
ment. Pound admired Mussolini and Hitler. Yeats and Wyndham
Lewis were fascist fellow travelers for a time, and Eliot's politics
have always seemed to me less admirable than his poetry and
criticism. Nevertheless, it was the writers who were under the
kind of literary influences Viereck dislikes who had the least to
do with Communism and who, when they did become involved,
made the earliest departures while those with the minds of
accountants lingered on. Compare the political record of Edmund
Wilson, Allen Tate, and Wallace Stevens with that of Howard
Fast, Dalton Trumbo, and Michael Gold. It is difficult to find
Communist names that do not look ludicrous alongside the
others.

From a moralist's point of view, it matters hardly at all
whether the Communist intellectuals achieved any of their
political aims or "affected the course of actual history." Guilt is
individual, and a man who is defeated by others in an attempt
at crime has as much to answer for everywhere but before the
law as the man who is successful. But moralists like Viereck
have a yen to strengthen their case by imputing success wherever
possible to the devils of their pieces. Viereck talks a lot about
Communist infiltration of the New Deal and about the terrible
presence of Alger Hiss at Yalta. There is no doubt that Com
munists did infiltrate the New Deal. It would be surprising
indeed if they had not done so. They were part of a world-wide
infiltrating movement, and some of them managed to get into

2^3 Communists and Intellectuals

governments policed a great deal more carefully than ours
Nazi Germany's, for example, and Imperial Japan's. Recent
Congressional investigations may have exaggerated the extent
of infiltration, but there was some, and there is no reason why a
sovereign state should have anywhere within its government
agents of a hostile state. Alger Hiss, Julian Wadleigh, and Carl
Marzani should not have been in the State Department. Lee
Pressman and John Abt should not have been in the Department
of Agriculture.

I have never seen, though, the slightest evidence that Com
munists in the government had any effect on policy. I have never
been able to think of a single major policy or decision that would
not have been taken if Washington had never let a Communist
past the District of Columbia line. This does not mean that
Communists had no influence at all; it simply means that I, in
common with Senator McCarthy, cannot come up with instances
of their influence. And it means that it is possible to conceive
of the history of the past twenty years as having been exactly
what it was without a trace of Communist influence. Viereck
speaks of Hiss at Yalta, of Hiss at San Francisco when the United
Nations was being organized, of Hiss in the State Department
throughout the war. And Hiss himself has spoken of his work on
the Yalta agreements and at the founding sessions of the U.N.
But the point about Yalta, surely, is not what papers Hiss may
have had a hand in drafting but in what agreements Roosevelt
and Stettinius signed. I cannot see what would have been
different if Hiss had been second secretary at Lima throughout
the conference. Quite conceivably some minor actions may have
been traceable to the presence of Communists and some decisions
affected to a degree by them; someone may have tucked in an
extra locomotive on a shipment to the Soviet Union or have
written a memorandum that influenced General George C.
Marshall's view of events in China. And it is even conceivable
that a balance was somewhere tipped by a Communist's exertion
of minute authority. Only the most cocksure of determinists
could categorically deny such possibilities. But reasonable men
do not spin theories around them.

Viereck prefaces his essay on the Bloody-Minded Professors

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 294

with the famous observation of the late Lord Keynes that
"Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling
their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
But Lord Keynes* remark applies to some demagogues and not
to others and in varying senses and degrees to those of whom it
is true. The Communist movement owes a clear and heavy debt
to a few intellectuals, all of them long since dead, but how about
the fascist movement? One could draw up a list of Hitler's and
Mussolini's intellectual obligations, certain of which would be to
Marx and Lenin, but I doubt very much if the prophets of
fascism were in any sense necessary to the movement. Hitler and
Mussolini were, like so many madmen in authority, scribblers
themselves, and even if I am mistaken in suspecting that they
distilled most of their own frenzies, their ideas were simple
enough and rude enough to have been generated in their own
rude minds in the event that this had been necessary.

And if a writer or professor stands at the shoulder of every
demagogue, where are the mentors of a man like Senator McCar
thy? Regrettably, this destroyer comes by a certain amount of
the misinformation he spreads through people who qualify or
once qualified as intellectuals, but what few ideas he has appear
to be strictly his own. The case of Stalin is also instructive.
Stalin has recently composed an essay the eagerness of tyrants
to be scribblers is quite a phenomenon in itself that is full of
political ideas and analyses, but these, apparently, do not grow
out of any reasonable or even unreasonable reading of the
sacred texts of Marxism. They seem to grow, on the contrary,
directly from the strategic requirements of the situation in which
he finds himself at the moment. And this, I think, is where
tyrants get most of their ideas. They may plagiarize their betters
out of vanity; they may conceal the evils they propose in the
language of philosophy; they may indeed be greatly aided by
ideas and may manipulate them to secure advantages of power.
But, by and large, power has its own logic, which is well within
the grasp of even the most sluggish of intellects, and it is a mis
reading of history to suppose that because some disasters have
been abetted by la trahison des clercs, all disasters can be under
stood by some doctrine of cherchez le clerc.

The Dead Red Decade

1956

MURRAY KEMPTON'S Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monu
ments of the Thirties is easily the best essay on American Com
munism and Communists that anyone has done, and it should
rank high in the broader category of books about American life
and politics. Kempton is a journalist of formidable talent and
versatility. Every phase of life interests him, and he has a novel
ist's sense of character and change. His work is not without grave
defects. He is a word-lover who sometimes lapses into mere
wordiness. His insights can be brilliant but his logic can be
ragged. He is an easy paradoxer and at times an outrageous
generalizer. He is capable of schmalz, particularly when, after
the current fashion, he stops writing about men and gets him
self all worked up over Man for example, "Man always hates
his last blind alley." On the whole, though, he is a remarkably
rewarding writer.

Kempton calls this book an account of "the myth of the
nine teen-thirties." He has in mind two myths, one the ridiculous
view of the world held by the Communists of the period, the
other the ridiculous view of the Communists of the period held
today in certain political circles in Washington and certain
intellectual circles in New York. Kempton is not the sort to be
trapped by his own schemes or held to his own agenda, and he
soon finds better things to do than deal with these myths, both
of which can be disposed of with a few light applications of
reason. In the main, his book is a series of character studies. His
"ruins and monuments" are human, and though they are
wildly diverse in their humanity, they mostly fall into two

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 196

categories: people whose resentments led them Into the Com
munist party and people whose resentments didn't. When it is
feasible, Kempton arranges his case studies in counterpoint.
Thus, he examines together the careers of Lee Pressman, the
clever government and C.I.O. lawyer who came closer, perhaps,
than any other American to being an iron Bolshevik intellectual
in the Lenin mold, and Gardner Jackson, the Boston newspaper
man who organized the Sacco-Vanzetti defense thirty years ago,
whose subsequent life (including a long period of services as an
associate of, among others, Pressman in the C.I.O.) has been one
loud protest after another, but who never succumbed to Com
munism. Paul Robeson, who succumbed, is paired with A. Philip
Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, who did not. The chilling story of Elizabeth Bentley, the
plain, meek, respectable Vassar girl who became the mistress and
slavey of a Soviet spy, and the chilling story of Ann Moos Reming
ton, the hard case from Bennington who made her Dartmouth
boy friend, the late William Remington, promise that he would
never, never be unfaithful to the Communist party, are told,
along with that of Mary Heaton Vorse, a gay and venerable
libertarian lady never a Communist, though once fleetingly
associated in matrimony with a man who later became one of
more deeply revolutionary instincts than either Miss Bentley or
the former Mrs. Remington. Some of Kempton's exhibits are
very rare birds indeed, incomparable in their plumage and al
together unique in their migratory habits, and these are dealt
with separately. Such a one is Dr. J. B. Matthews, a son of the
Bible Belt and former missionary to the Japanese who in the
early thirties became the world's champion fellow traveler,
joining Communist fronts as compulsively as a pie-eating cham
pion eats pies, and who is still a titleholder, as the ranking
heavyweight informer, the apostates' apostate, the dinner-jacketed
tycoon of anti-Communism. Dr. Matthews is beyond compare,
and for him Kempton abandons his counterpoint method.

The lives blighted by Communism are Kempton's "ruins,"
and the others are his ''monuments." But it is no simple piety or
modish sense of political rectitude that pervades his work. Some
of the ruins are admirable and worth revisiting, while some of

sp/ The Dead Red Decade

the monuments got to be monuments only because nature
endowed them with an attribute of all statuary, lifelessness.
Picking his way through the rubble, Kempton sees much that
others have failed to see. Most Communists, he feels, were rebels
whose rebelliousness was either defective or arrested, and this
notion provides an illumination that no previous critic has
offered. Where others, for example, have seen in the proper,
fastidious, junior-executive comportment of Alger Hiss a dev
ilishly clever masquerade, Kempton, in the study of the Hiss-
Chambers case that opens his book, sees that comportment as
the real thing. Hiss had a quarrel with the genteel side of his
shabby-genteel upbringing, and he came out second best. He was
a revolutionist manque, a man in whom the doctrine's pull was
strong but never as strong as the pull of his own past. The
friendship with Chambers was the essence of Hiss's revolutionary
experience in fact, it was the experience, at least through the
years it lasted. Hiss could be a Communist and pass documents
and give a party organizer a beat-up Ford, but he could not be a
revolutionist except vicariously, through the agency of Whitaker
Chambers. This, of course, is a speculation on Kempton *s part,
but it is a compelling one. How human it would be, Kempton
says, for Alger Hiss, granted his Marxism, granted his shabby-
genteel background, granted a cozy bureaucratic success he could
not reject, to find in Chambers exactly what he found wanting
in himself. "Chambers must have sat in the Hiss apartment with
all his scars upon him, a lowering symbol of power and ex
perience . . . the image of dedication and adjustment to alien
ation . . . the image of absolute revolt and the breaking of
the bands." As Hiss, in this subjective reconstruction, perceived
in Chambers a means of redressing his grievances against him
self, Chambers perceived, or imagined he perceived, in Hiss
what he himself had lost through winning, years earlier, the
argument with his own shabby-genteel environment. In the
friendship with Hiss, Kempton thinks, Chambers was already
straining toward the respectability and orderliness he now sets
such store by. "Could Chambers have seen in Hiss the image of
absolute security? . . . [He] seemed to reach out to the Hisses
with some of that same passion for the ordinary and the normal

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 298

which runs through his later odes to simple Americans. . . .
[A] whole part of Whittaker Chambers must have come fleeing
to Alger Hiss, and this apartment, poor in imagination though
it was, must have been ... as close to peace as this man pursued
by the furies could ever get. For, if the Hisses had consciously
rejected the sheltered life, they still lived within it."

It is a weakness of Kempton's method that Communism keeps
getting reduced to a kind of do-it-yourself psychotherapy. He
knows it is more than that, and now and then he says so, but he
never really takes the full measure of the idea or the movement.
Still, this approach unearths a few ironies, one of which is that
so malevolent a conspiracy should have been staffed by men and
women of such piddling malevolence, of what (by any rational
analysis) would appear to be a strictly third-rate talent for evil.
Their boldest dreams were not very far beyond their realities.
To have been a Communist bureaucrat rather than a New Deal
bureaucrat would, apparently, have been the height of romance
for Alger Hiss. The most incendiary remark Chambers could
recall Hiss making was "Joe Stalin certainly plays for keeps."
A bit of appreciation by untutored savages in the mission
fields, by May Day paraders, or by a claque rounded up on
Madison Avenue by George Sokolsky seems to be all that Dr.
Matthews has ever asked. Elizabeth Bentley faltered into Com
munism while seeking the company that misery craves. She
might as easily have found it in the Y.W.C.A. Broadening her
horizons, she sought domesticity and ended up a spy queen.

Kempton makes his points most vividly in his consideration
of the Communist writers in Hollywood. Communism in Holly
wood had no function and no consequences except those that
could be bought, outside Hollywood, with the money the movie
people kicked in. And this was never very much. By plodding
through transcripts of Congressional hearings and by under
taking other research, Kempton has established that all the
cash the Communists got from Hollywood would not have kept
the Daily Worker solvent for six months, and that getting it
was a terrible ordeal for the party. Like bankers beefing about
their tax burdens, the fif teen-hundred-a-week Gorkis were forever
beefing about the high cost of subversion, and in many cases

2$ 9 The Dead Red Decade

they returned to Americanism heavily in arrears to un-American-
ism. Kempton has also made a painfully close study of the output
of the Gorkis when their revolutionary ardor was high films like
"Pride of the Marines," "Mama Runs Wild," "They Shall Have
Music/' "Sorority House/' "The Kid from Kokomo," and "Radio
City Revels/' He found the contents fairly represented by the
titles. It might be supposed that men who aspired to liberate
humanity from the kingdom of necessity, to strike the shackles
from all the slaves of capitalism, would be violently in revolt
against a fate that compelled them (or did it? Who said they had
to work in Hollywood?) to expend their talent on such stuff.
They were in revolt, but not aggressively so. The Hollywood
Communists, Kempton says, "sounded passionate in their protest
against Hitler or Franco or Tom Girdler and countless other
distant devils. But they ceased very soon to be passionate in their
protest against Hollywood/' When they learned that Budd
Schulberg was saying nasty things about the industry in "What
Makes Sammy Run?/' their ideologues descended on him and
tried to talk him out of allowing the book to be published,
because they regarded it as an attack on a great folk art. Schul
berg found this argument unconvincing and quit the party. The
truth is that there were more affinities between Hollywood and
Communism than were ever dreamed of by Congressional investi
gators. Both made the same demands on artists "the presenta
tion of an image of the common man so ... hyperbolic and so
contrived as to be totally removed from reality. . * . The slogans,
the sweeping formulae, the superficial clangor of Communist
culture had a certain fashion in Hollywood precisely because
they were two-dimensional appeals to a two-dimensional com
munity." In the end, the industry turned out to have the greater
vitality. "The Hollywood Communists . . . were unable to cor
rupt them, and they got rich fabricating empty banalities to fit
Hollywood's idea of life in America."

In the course of this survey, Kempton goes in some detail into
the history of three trade unions: the National Maritime Union,
the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the United Auto
mobile Workers. His commentaries must be among the most
readable and instructive ones ever written on American trade

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 300

unionism, a subject that normally attracts only the most cloddish
sort of researchers. Of these three organizations, only the
National Maritime Union was ever controlled by Communists.
The two others were given a good deal of trouble by them but
were never captured. Many of the principal leaders of the
N.M.U. had at one time been members of the party. When the
moment came, however, for them to choose between their union
and their party, the best of them, with hardly a trace of anguish,
chose the union. Kempton makes the point that these labor men
were almost the only American Communists whose quarrel with
society was clearly distinguishable from their quarrel with
themselves. Doubtless there were some Communists whose aliena
tion had similar causes, who were in rebellion against the
realities of life around them and not simply in flight from reality,
but most American Communists, according to Kempton, had a
strong sense of their own guilt and only a feeble awareness of any
evil in the economic system. If his theory is sound, it is politically
encouraging, for it suggests that those who become Communists
out of hunger, actual or metaphorical, can easily put Communism
aside. When the hunger of the Maritime leaders "was appeased
and they were no longer alienated, they departed with only a
backward glance." It has become fashionable lately to say that
Communism is a malady of the spirit and will not be cured by
Marshall Plans, Point Four programs, and military alliances.
Our experience with Communists in this country is often cited
in defense of this view. Kempton's investigation suggests that
the meaningful kind of Communism, the kind that has real
consequences in the real world, is a malady of society and can
be socially dealt with.

On Political Sophistication

1961

POLITICS, Bismarck is said to have said, is the art of the possible.
Nothing, on the one hand, could be more obvious; nothing, on
the other, could be closer to the height of sophistication. There
is, after all, no art of the impossible, and there are other disci
plines engineering, for example in which the essential calcula
tions are of feasibility. Still, Bismarck struck at the heart of the
matter. The essence of political judgment is the appraisal of
potentials. The true political sophisticate knows what the options
are and how much of what is desirable is attainable. (If his gift
is of the highest order, he knows how much of what is attainable
is desirable.) He knows which tensions can be withstood and
which are unendurable. He knows that the magnitude of commit
ments must be matched by the magnitude of available power.
In politics, sophistication has nothing to do with chic or refine
ment or the haut monde. It is not a finish or a facade; it is a
supporting member, part of the foundation. It can be accom
panied by coarseness of mind and manner. Up to a point, it is a
morally and intellectually neutral quality. Up to a point, Joseph
Stalin and Joseph McCarthy shared it with Mahatma Gandhi and
Woodrow Wilson. It is not in all cases required for success, and
success is not invariably the lot of those who possess it. Dwight
Eisenhower lacked it and got along splendidly. Robert A. Taft
had it in abundance and lost all the big games. In general,
though, the memorable figures are the astute reckoners of the
possibilities, and the most memorable are those who have made
the boldest reckonings and been proved right those, that is to
say, who have seen and sought the outermost limits of the realm

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 302

of the possible. Franklin D. Roosevelt was such a one. John F.
Kennedy gives promise of being another. Our age has also been
rich in men who have seen possibilities one wishes they had been
blind to Lenin at the Finland Station, Hitler in Munich, Mao
Tse-tung in the marshes with the Eighth Route Army.

Conservatives are, by and large, fonder than liberals and
radicals of Bismarck's dictum, and they habitually consign all
idealists and apostles of change to the ranks of the unsophisti
cated. In this, they are gravely mistaken. There are sophisticated
idealists, and there are naive conservatives. The Reverend Martin
Luther King is an example of the first, the Reverend Barry Gold-
water of the second. The Alabama pastor had a large vision of
what might be attainable through militant nonviolence, and he
is today the effective leader and symbol of an exceedingly influ
ential movement in American life. The Arizona pastor may get
the Republican nomination in 1964, but only if at convention
time the Republican party is resigned to a defeat of great magni
tude; he is unlikely in any event to have a significant impact on
our society, for he is an atrocious judge of the options of leader
ship in an industrial society in the twentieth century. Indeed,
he will not so much as address himself to the problem. Connois
seurs of political nai'vet^ would be hard put to pick up a choicer
piece than this from Conscience of a Conservative: "The princi
ples on which the Conservative position is based have been estab
lished by a process that has nothing to do with the social, eco
nomic, and political landscape that changes from decade to decade
and from century to century." A man can be both far out and
sophisticated but not far out of this world and this century.

The politician fearful of having sins of omission charged to
his account will take refuge in the doctrine that politics is the art
of the possible, which in folk wisdom may be translated as,
"Don't bite off more than you can chew." The political sophisti
cate honors this injunction and knows of instances in which too
large a bite or too few teeth has led to grief. The late John
Foster Dulles was in many respects a great public servant, but he
was in certain crucial ways a most unsophisticated diplomat. He
confused preachment with power. He everlastingly proposed
more than he was able to dispose. He talked of "liberation" of

505 On Political Sophistication

the captive nations as though it could be accomplished by the
letting of rhetoric rather than by the letting of blood. He sought
to form impregnable alliances in the Far East and in the Middle
East, and he got the signatures of the head men on paper. Paper
turned out to be what the alliances were made of. He was operat
ing outside the realm of the possible; he had bitten off more than
he could chew. But this is no greater a failing than its corollary,
which is underestimation of masticatory and digestive capacity.
The ranks of the forgotten and the dishonored are filled with
those who have not seen far enough. The name of Neville
Chamberlain would be celebrated today if he had had Winston
Churchill's sense of how much was within the realm of the
possible for the British people. The political sophisticate, having
acknowledged the supreme unwisdom of biting off more than
you can chew, would also point out that there can be folly and
misery in biting off less than you can chew.

Power can serve good, bad, or indifferent ends, and most
political men must now and then traffic in ideas and principles.
Where ideas are involved, another and more traditional aspect of
sophistication taste, intellectual discrimination, cultivation
becomes relevant. The Messrs. Stalin and McCarthy can be
described as political sophisticates only because principles did not
compete with one another in their closed universes. The Russian
accepted Marxist dogma as a completed science. The American
was cheerfully free of any concern about the validity of ideas.
There are many less lustrous figures of high sophistication who
are simply beyond ideology. The United States Congress has
many skillful, wily, and knowing men whose basic notions of
justice, truth, and beauty are communicated to them directly
from the grass roots toward which their ears are always bent.
But most men recognize a conflict of principles, and most men
wish to believe that there is a correspondence between their own
ideology and virtue. In free societies, participants in the political
process may shop for remedies in a market that contains a stag
gering variety of them cunningly advertised, as a rule, and
gaudily packaged. It seems to me that there are two equally
sophisticated approaches to political ideas. One may be taken
by the man who feels a call to have an early and direct impact

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 304

. sitting President, let us say, or almost any serious officeholder
or office seeker. The other may be taken by a man who, while
aware that mere sermonizing is unlikely to deflect human evil,
knows what power there can be in the repeated assertion and
exemplification of principle. Both types must be concerned with
what is within the realm of the possible, but the realm of the
possible is within the realm of time, a dimension that alters
perspectives. It was not Mr. Dulles' zeal for liberation of the
satellites that revealed a lack of sophistication; the principle is
noble and probably essential to the foreign policy of the West
ern powers* His nai'vet^ was revealed by his effort to make it a
programmatic aim of the American government in 1953 and
1954. Similarly, Senator Goldwater seems naive not because his
ideas lack dignity, moral worth, or even practicability, but
because the energies he expends for their advancement are
expended within the framework of operative power, which in his
time will offer them no hospitality. Norman Thomas, the Socialist
leader, has been vastly more sophisticated. He has spent a life
time outside the framework of operative power, where reason,
eloquence, and force of character have a chance, and his influence
over the long run has probably been as great as that of Senators
Styles Bridges and Everett McKinley Dirksen, in tandem.

The sophisticate, when he deals with political ideas, must do
more than take moral soundings and measure the currents of
power. There are ideas that positively ooze goodness and are
altogether within the realm of the possible, yet are unacceptable
on the grounds that their consequences would be awful. Unilat
eral nuclear disarmament, as a case in point, is surely an attain
able goal. It has attracted some highly practical and sophisticated
politicians in England, and the anxieties that have bred the
clamor for it there are bound to mount on this side of the
Atlantic. Its appeal is to the very best instincts. There are argu
ments in its favor plausible enough to commend themselves to
Bertrand Russell, surely one of the most sophisticated men of
our century. Its fatal programmatic weakness, which one sup
poses would have been spotted by a younger Lord Russell, is
that it ignores the basic facts of power. Nations of either malign

205 On Political Sophistication

or benign intent use superior power for whatever leverage they
can gain with it. The Soviet Union does it; we do it, when we
can. If Nation A were to disarm totally in advance of Nation B,
Nation B's power would be augmented by a factor of infinity.
To expect restraint and forbearance on the part of Nation B
would be to expect what all of human experience tells us we
have no right to expect. In considering such a proposition as
unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Westerner with a ripened
political mind would ask himself whether, if the shoe were on
the other foot and it were the Soviets who proposed to divest
themselves of power, the West would seek no gain whatever from
the absolute superiority it would thereby be accorded. Gullibility
may be an amiable failing in some departments of life. The
sucker may be afflicted by nothing but an excess of faith, hope,
and charity, and surely there are worse things than that. Political
gullibility has political consequences, which can be disastrous.
The specter that haunts several continents today militant inter
national communism, supported by intercontinental ballistic
missiles with atomic warheads is to a large degree founded upon
the gullibility of men and women of irreproachable social moral
ity and a high level of intellectual sophistication. The Soviet
Union may by now have schooled a bureaucracy of time-serving,
case-hardened bureaucrats, but among those who brought the
bureaucracy into being were many men of intelligence and of a
dedication that was not in itself despicable. Outside the Soviet
Union, in the decades since the Russian Revolution, communism
has advanced not by the efforts of the worst elements in society
but, more often than not, by those who have been close to the
best if our measure of the best registers generosity of spirit and
an awareness of existing evils. Their weakness, which helped
to create a form of strength that imperils freedom, was generally
a weakness of the critical faculties. They would not give the
remedies that attracted them the same hard scrutiny they gave
to the ills they were eager to cure. They could not bring to their
own rebellion the detachment with which they viewed the institu
tions they judged to be oppressive. This seems always the tragedy
of political passion that it is the enemy of a tempering sophisti-

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 306

cation. From the appearance of things at the moment, a similar
tragedy is in the making where the nationalist fevers are running
high in Latin America and in Africa.

It is a curious feature of politics that it corrodes sophistication
even where passions are not deeply engaged. There is the case of
Bertrand Russell, the greatest of modern skeptics and rational
ists. There is the case of Jean-Paul Sartre, a living monument to
shrewdness, who has propounded more childish nonsense about
politics in the last decade than any other European except his
close associate, Simone de Beauvoir, a great sophisticate in her
own right, who has managed to misconstrue, in lengthy books, not
only the problems of Europe, but those of the United States
and China as well. And there is our own Ezra Pound, the most
cosmopolitan of Americans, learned, tough-minded, and often
breath-taking in his critical insights but a patsy for Benito
Mussolini and a great clutch of lesser scoundrels. Somehow an
intimate knowledge of human folly and a study of its myriad
manifestations through the ages is not enough to shield them from
political folly and from what the late George Orwell liked to
call the "smelly little orthodoxies" that have so often enlisted
their sympathies and their talents.

Part of the difficulty, I think, is that politics, like love, appears
to invite, even demand, involvement, passionate or otherwise.
The sophisticated man can look upon the arts as something to
be enjoyed, appraised, improved by, and indulged in if the
consequences seem likely to be valuable to himself or anyone else.
Politics calls for meddling as a ripe peach calls for eating partic
ularly, of course, in a free society, and most particularly in a
time of crisis. In the twenties, Walter Lippmann could give the
political sophisticate a simple credo that had detachment and
observation at its core. "The mature man," he wrote, "would
take the world as it comes and remain within himself quite
unperturbed. And so, whether he saw the thing as comedy, or
high tragedy, or plain farce, he would affirm that it is what it is,
and that the wise man can enjoy it." Lippmann is the dean of
sophisticates today, but the world of his seventies is a world too
anguished and too imperiled for him to commend it as an enter
taining spectacle. Yet there is, it seems to me, a saving value in

307 On Political Sophistication

sophistication that can grow with detachment and should even
be able to survive involvement. An affair with a political idea or
a political leader may resemble a love affair, but there is no sound
reason why a man should play the game according to the same
rules. No doctrine must be embraced simply for being its own
dear self. There is nothing immoral or unfaithful in discarding
an idea that has lost its youthful charm. There is nothing fickle
in carrying on with several ideas at the same time. Ideas do not
demand to be adored; they demand to be studied and applied
when it is useful to apply them. Leaders have no claim upon our
loyalty or affection except as they earn it from day to day. It is
for them and not for their followers to remain constant. Politics
is the art of the possible, and the possible is always in flux.

Perhaps the greatest of all political sophisticates was the
Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who reigned, according to
Gibbon, in "the period in the history of the world during which
the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.
. . . The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by
absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The
armies were restrained by four successive emperors, whose
characters and authority commanded involuntary respect . . .
who delighted in the image of liberty and were pleased with
considering themselves the accountable ministers of the law."
Marcus Aurelius "was severe to himself, indulgent to the
imperfections of others, just and beneficent to all mankind.
. . . War he detested as the disgrace and calamity of human
nature, but when the necessity of a just defense called upon him
to take up arms, he readily exposed his person to eight winter
campaigns on the frozen banks of the Danube, the severity of
which was at last fatal. . . ." In an army camp, he wrote his
great Meditations, which contains a sophisticated credo that is
unlikely ever to call for revision:

Make for thyself a definition or description of the thing which is pre
sented to thee, so as to see distinctly what kind of thing it is in its
substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell thyself its
proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been com
pounded and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so produc
tive o elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and

JUDGMENTS RESERVED 3 o8

truly every object which is presented to thee in life, and always to
look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe
this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value
everything has with reference to the whole, and what with reference to
man, who is a citizen of the highest city, of which all other cities are
like families; what each thing is and of what it is composed, and how
long it is the nature of this thing to endure which now makes an im
pression on me.

Ch fries Eggert

RICHARD H. ROVERE

is one of the country's best-known political
analysts. He has been a staff writer for The
NeiD Yorker since 1944, and since 1948 has
contributed its ''Letter from Washington."
A native New Yorker, he is a graduate of
Bard College, and a member of the editorial
board of The American Scholar. He is a
frequent contributor to the Neiv York
Times, Esquire, and Harper's. He is married
and has three children. In addition to
Senator Joe McCarthy, he has published
three books Howe e^ Huf/vmel: Their
True mid Scandalous History; The General
and the President (with Arthur M. Schles-
inger, Jr.); aad Affairs of State: The Eisen
hower Years.

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